The Crisis and Upheaval in Eastern Europe

Abstract

The dramatic upheavals in Eastern Europe, in the face of democratic pressures from below and long overdue reforms and liberalization from above, highlight the general crisis of the state systems ruled by Communist parties. Political and economic reforms have pushed the prolonged low level systemic crisis of the East European state socialist systems into apparently terminal crisis. The East European state systems, their differences notwithstanding, permit us to speculate about a general question: the limits and possibilities of change in the Communist regimes. A number of the proposed Soviet reforms have been experimented with for over two decades on the much smaller scale which individual East European countries afford. Comparisons have to made with caution since the East European Communist regimes have been imposed on these states from the outside and were in any case more recent than the Soviet one. The order of scale itself is also important. However there are sufficient similarities for Eastern Europe to be a cracked mirror of the Soviet Union's possible future, or at least the most probable future. The fate of these societies and political systems has a direct bearing on any prospects of the socialist project since it was in good part the flawed and perverted experiences of the Soviet and East European communist politocrasies that put the very idea of socialism in question everywhere. Whatever democratic socialists and various native intellectual dissidents say about these societies not having been genuinely socialist and therefore not a valid test of the possibility of socialism for the vast majority of the world those experiences do bear on the validity of some major assumptions shared by socialists in general. AL the very least, they cast a very negative light on the performance of highly centralized command economies at other than early industrialization stages of development.' There is also some distorted family resemblance and a partly similar vocabulary. The Prague Spring in 1968 had been greeted with joy and relief by activists in the mass Communist parties of the industrial capitalist democracies since it seemed to show that communism in power could regenerate itself. Two decades later the Gorbachev reforms raise hopes among a far wider political public, although (or perhaps because) they occur under conditions of a visible moral and ideological crisis of both Communist politocratic regimes and the general socialist project. The hope for internal redemption and transformation remains a powerful one that all the sacrifices and brutalities under these regimes will not