Central And Eastern Europe

The Opening Curtain?

William E Griffith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429718694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A collection of workshop articles by The East-West Forum, located in Washington, D.C., and New York, a research and policy analysis organization sponsored by the Samuel Bronfman Foundation. The Forum aims to build a bridge between scholarship and policymaking. This volume holds the examination of perestroika against the history of the communist countries of Europe.

1
Central and Eastern Europe: The Global Context

DOI: 10.4324/9780429033162-1

William E. Griffith

The global high-technology revolution and the inability of Communist leaders of Central and Eastern Europe to cope with it are driving these countries, and the Soviet Union, into further decline vis-a-vis the Western developed world. Their relative decline is the worse because for the first time since 1945 this revolution centers outside Europe, in East Asia and the United States, against which this decline must now be measured. The economic and technological revival of Western Europe, especially of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the only state with a compelling political as well as a traditional economic interest in Central and Eastern Europe, and the European Community's (EC) revived move toward unity make the EC, and most of all the FRG, an increasingly important economic, financial, and technological partner for these Communist countries. Even so, despite Mikhail Gorbachev's probable inability to catch up with the West in high technology, the Soviet Union will still keep its predominant influence over its key strategic allies, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Poland. Nevertheless, continuing Soviet technological backwardness will intensify the decline of Central and Eastern Europe.

The high-technology revolution has other negative consequences for Communist Central and Eastern Europe, as it does for other declining countries, including much of the Third World. The more important high technology becomes for economic growth, the more economies require better educated and skilled personnel, more emphasis on meritocracy, and therefore less on egalitarianism. Communist ideology and working-class sentiment oppose this. So does the ruling Communist political-bureaucratic intelligentsia, the nomenklatura, because massive replacement of ideologically but not technologically qualified managers is one precondition for success in high technology. Finally, this revolution, like the first Industrial Revolution, increases disparities between and among more and less developed states: in Central and Eastern Europe, for example, between East Germany and Poland and between Slovenia and Macedonia.

The high-technology revolution is primarily an information revolution based on the extremely rapid acquisition, processing, and retrieval of immense quantities of data made possible by microelectronics and computers. (This is also true of its other main component, biotechnology.) Its fundamental impact is to render national borders, and thus national sovereignty, inconsequential for many economic activities.¹ It is the more rapid because it is the first one in which two relatively equal, meritocratic states, the United States and Japan, are competing so fiercely that they are driving each other forward much more rapidly than either would forge ahead on its own.² Thus, Communist Central and Eastern Europe is falling even more rapidly behind than was the case in the first Industrial Revolution.

The Soviet Union is only a military superpower. Its attractiveness as a political, economic, or cultural model has collapsed, most of all in Central and Eastern Europe, where Soviet technological backwardness has become a future to be feared, not a model to be imitated. But the high-technology revolution also has great military implications. The 1982 Israeli destruction of the Syrian air force and air defenses showed what Western military high technology can do. Because military high technology, nuclear and conventional, feeds on nonmilitary high technology, Gorbachev and the Soviet military need nonmilitary microelectronic high technology in order not to become what they fear the most: a second-rate military power.

To understand the crisis in Communist Central and Eastern Europe we must first analyze the causes, contents, and probable results for Moscow's allies of Gorbachev's changes in the Soviet Union. The main causes of the crisis have been the decline in Soviet economic growth; the USSR's increasing technological backwardness; its accelerating social strains, notably alcoholism and rising mortality rates; its massive corruption; the bureaucratic antireformism of its nomenklatura; and its overextension and self-engendered isolation in foreign policy.

Gorbachev's revolutionary "new thinking"—perestroika (restructuring), glasnost' (openness), and demokratizatsiya (democratization)—is a consequence of his view, new to Marxism-Leninism, that the economic base and political superstructure of Soviet society have become major obstacles to, rather than instruments for, the advancement of socialism. Therefore, he holds, the USSR must be qualitatively revolutionized from above under continued Communist party leadership, albeit without violence and not against a class enemy (although Gorbachev hints that the nomenklatura is that). This, he hopes, will include the establishment of a partial rule of law; the passage of some, but not decisive, power from the Communist party to elected state organs; moves toward a market economy; and a greater emphasis on the human factor, that is, a shift from class to individual interests and incentives.

In the Soviet Union, as in Central and Eastern Europe, the working class has been the chief mass beneficiary of Communist egalitarianism. But the high-technology revolution rewards achievement, intensifies social stratification, and downgrades unskilled labor. It makes full employment—that is, concealed overemployment—a greater enemy of productivity and economic growth. When to this is added the traditional passivity of the working class in most underdeveloped countries, such as most of the Soviet Union, plus the total distrust of their Communist masters by the post-Solidarity Polish working class, the obstacles in the Soviet Union and in Communist Central and Eastern Europe to modernization (rising productivity, economic growth, and technological innovation) are immense indeed.

Soviet foreign policy's "new thinking," according to Gorbachev, also requires modernization, given the dangers of nuclear war and ecological catastrophe, north-south tensions, and Soviet external overextension and resultant isolation and encirclement. It follows that there can be no victory in nuclear war; that there is no possibility of military superiority; and that Karl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is the violent extension of politics is invalid. These require that Soviet foreign policy emphasize Soviet-U.S. and Sino-Soviet detente, interdependence, and mutual security rather than international class struggle against imperialism even at the risk of war. Nuclear deterrence and parity must be replaced by "reasonable sufficiency" and by a gradual transition to a nonnuclear world and to the nonuse of force to solve international conflicts, while preserving strategic stability by arms control agreements. An operationally defensive strategy must replace an offensive one, and glasnost' must be extended to military postures (that is, by intrusive verification). Soviet expansion in the Third World must no longer be judged, as Leonid Brezhnev did, by East-West geostrategic considerations but by regional ones, and therefore such expansion must be abandoned or cut back when it has been unsuccessful or has interfered with detente. The Soviet Union must also become more active in international organizations such as the U.N., GATT, and UNCTAD to help Soviet modernization and increase Soviet influence in them.³

Western sceptics maintain that all this is at worst disinformation to lull the West into lack of vigilance and at best merely a pause (peredyshka), the better to resume the advance later on. Such scepticism has recently been proven false with respect to the Soviet-Yugoslav break and the Sino-Soviet dispute, and the present relatively open Soviet criticism of Joseph Stalin's and Leonid Brezhnev's foreign policy makes its current falsity likely.

The Soviet need for major economic reforms was clear several years before Brezhnev died. But had, say, Viktor Grishin, not Gorbachev, been elected General Secretary when Konstantin Chernenko died, he would not soon, if ever, have introduced the major reforms that Gorbachev has. Thus, the personality of the new leader was a major factor in at least the timing of this great change in Soviet domestic and foreign policy and its consequences for Communist Central and Eastern Europe. The converse might become true, but probably only partially so, if Gorbachev were to be removed or feel compelled to reverse his reforms, but neither seemed likely in late 1988.

Ronald Reagan reciprocated Gorbachev's detente policy primarily because US. public opinion came to favor detente, and so eventually and largely for that reason did he. After the 1975 fall of Saigon, according to U.S. public opinion polls, most Americans gave first priority to strengthening U.S. military capability. This continued until the early 1980s, when public sentiment began to focus instead on arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, although most Americans still deeply distrusted Moscow. Reagan's victory in intermediate nuclear forces (INF) deployment; his triumphal reelection in 1984; his increasing concern with the destructiveness of nuclear weapons and with history's verdict about his administration; his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which he hoped would become a shield against Soviet nuclear attack; and the urgings of Secretary of State George Shultz pushed him in the same direction. Thus, the timing of Gorbachev's coming to power and Reagan's turn toward detente was nearly simultaneous.⁴

Historically, in Central and Eastern Europe, except in interwar Czechoslovakia, nationalism won over modernization, and the region thereby remained semideveloped.⁵ But today popular support for each reinforces the other because Soviet domination means economic backwardness, political repression, cultural stagnation, and foreign domination. In addition, for the more developed Central European states, the Soviet demand for more and better quality exports interferes with their hard-currency purchases of Western technology by means of exports to the West and thus accelerates their declining export competitiveness and their differentiation.⁶

The latter is in large part the result of the reassertion of traditional historic patterns. Thus, "Central and Eastern Europe" has lost much of its relevance. (Do East Berlin and Tirana, Weimar and Pristina, belong to the same region? A historical absurdity!) Of the three westernmost countries, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, the export competitiveness of the first and the last is threatened by the Pacific Rim states, whereas the second is barely waking up to this danger. Conversely, Poland and Romania are rapidly sinking into the Third World. The southern and eastern parts of Yugoslavia are threatened with the same fate, from which Albania has not yet escaped, whereas Bulgaria is becoming developed.

The impact in Communist Central and Eastern Europe of Gorbachev's reforms is different, greater, and more destabilizing than in the Great Russian half of the Soviet Union. (It is not necessarily less destabilizing than in the other nations of the Soviet Union, as we have seen in the Baltic republics, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the western Ukraine.) This is the result of the post-1953 Central and East European "destabilization syndrome": reform in the Soviet Union; nationalist unrest among the non-Great Russians; the decline of fear and the consequent rise of dissidence among the intelligentsia; the release of nationalist discontents; the advanced age of several of the Central and East European leaders and the consequent likelihood of succession struggles; and the historically demonstrable probability that "appetite grows with eating," that political decompression from above after tyranny is likely to get out of the control of the decompressors. In Communist Central and Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, East Germany, and Hungary, the economic situation worsened after at first improving, another classic cause of political destabilization. Moreover, most of these countries have always thought themselves culturally superior to, if unfortunately dominated by Russia. The impact in the region of Gorbachev's revolution is also likely to be greater than that of Nikita Khrushchev's reforms because Gorbachev's go much farther, as does his acknowledgment of Soviet backwardness and the consequent Soviet delegitimization.

Gorbachev's policies toward Communist Central and Eastern Europe are contradictory and therefore counterproductive. On the one hand, he favors reform and detente, which in the past have neither succeeded nor stabilized the region but have done the contrary. This policy implies greater ties with the West, from which credits and high technology can be secured, but these ties bring political influence, as does exposure to popular Western culture. On the other hand, Gorbachev wants to stabilize, at a somewhat lower level, primary Soviet influence in Central and Eastern Europe and to have the region contribute to the modernization of Soviet society. His policies there are thus risky indeed.

Although the Hungarian and East German opposition to Soviet INF counterdeployment and the breaking off of arms control negotiations probably played a minor role in Western calculations, public opinion in East Berlin and Budapest supported their leaders' resistance and Gorbachev's and Reagan's renewed detente because these publics had no taste for annihilation without representation. Moreover, their leaders knew that only renewed detente, especially with West Germany, would increase the flow to them of Western credits and technology, which they needed because of their own technological backwardness, the increasing competition of the Pacific Rim states, and the rising Soviet demand for more and better quality exports from them.⁷

Gorbachev and his colleagues have said less that is new about Communist Central and Eastern Europe than about any other region of Soviet foreign policy. The main point that he has made, notably in the spring 1988 Soviet-Yugoslav communique, is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Central and Eastern Europe: The Global Context
• 2 Eastern Europe and the West in the Perspective of Time
• 3 The Economies and Trade of Eastern Europe
• 4 Technology Transfer to Eastern Europe: Paradoxes Policies, Prospects
• 5 The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: New Prospects and Old Dilemmas
• 6 The Soviets, the Warsaw Pact, and the Eastern European Militaries
• 7 Human Rights and Civil Society in Eastern Europe
• 8 The Future of Poland: Perestroika or Perpetual Crisis?
• 9 Reforming Communist Systems: Lessons from the Hungarian Experience
• 10 Czechoslovakia Between East and West
• 11 Yugoslavia: Worsening Economic and Nationalist Crisis
• 12 Conservatism and Nationalism in the Balkans: Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania
• 13 The German Democratic Republic
• 14 West German Policy Toward Central and Eastern Europe
• 15 French Policy Toward Central and Eastern Europe
• 16 The United States and Eastern Europe: A Window of Opportunity
• 17 U.S. and Western Policy—New Opportunities for Action
• 18 Central and Eastern Europe, Perestroika, and the Future of the Cold War
• Index