The Long-Run Weight of Communism or the Weight of Long-Run History?

Abstract

If one were to have made predictions in 1912 about the outlook for Russia, Central Europe and China in 2012, what plausible scenarios could one imagine? Surprisingly, one can well imagine scenarios that are very close to what we are observing today. Prediction is often nothing less than an extrapolation from the past. Russia was modernizing economically but was remaining politically very autocratic. Central Europe was economically very prosperous and well integrated into Western Europe but was experiencing nationalistic tensions. China was waking up from its torpor and opening up to the out-side world, searching for modern institutions capable of unifying it, in all likelihood via a unified military command. A hundred years later, some of the trends one could observe in the early twentieth century can still be observed today. The remarkable thing is that during this century, these different regions of the world have all undergone several decades of living under a communist regime, which had mostly not been predicted in 1912. Seen in the very long term, it would seem, however, that these decades of communism have not left a great influence on the long-run trends one observes in these regions of the world. Was the communist experience, in the very long term, nothing more than a minor historical blip in the long-run evolution of these countries?1