Democracy in the New Europe: The Politics of Post-communism [Paperback]

In most of the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, the absence of civil society during the communist era forced people to retreat into the private sphere. In his chapter on Slovakia, Frederic Wehrle identifies the problem of a 'democratic deficit' making for a weak political culture and slowing down the transition to a fully-developed democracy. Wehrle attributes this to the fact that prior to 1989 Slovakia had experienced only a very brief period of national independence. In some countries, this tendency towards a weak civil society has persisted even though communism itself has vanished. As Marion Recktenwald points out, in Ukraine decades of exposure to utopian ideologies, disillusion caused by delayed and unfulfilled promises, and lack of reward for initiative contributed to what she calls an inclination towards 'magic thinking' - a proclivity to trust in quick remedies rather than to look for constructive, long-term solutions entailing hardship and risk.

Although communist regimes were overthrown in popular revolutions, citizens of the new democracies often express a sense of discontent with the newly-installed successor regimes. In most of the post-communist states, neo- or reformed communist parties have as a result been able to return to power through the ballot box and to form the government for at least one term of office. This situation arose in large part because of heightened expectations in 1989: many Central and Eastern Europeans saw 'democracy' as a road to higher living standards; they hoped that the transformation would be quick and painless, and that it would quickly lead to membership of Western organizations, notably the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU).

The reality proved considerably more difficult. Following the collapse of communism, all the new democracies experienced profound economic recession, high inflation and - particularly traumatic for countries that had been accustomed to full employment - increasingly high levels of unemployment. None of the countries discussed in this volume has had an entirely smooth ride, and some countries have experienced serious economic and social upheavals. While Vello Pettai's chapter on the Baltic States shows the three countries, their independence restored, swiftly rebounding from Soviet domination, Fabian Schmidt's chapter on Albania portrays a country descending into virtual anarchy once the straitjacket of communist rule was shaken off. Even the citizens of the former East Germany, as Jonathan Grix and Julie Smith show, were profoundly shaken by the experience of moving to the market economy, despite the fact that they could, to a far greater extent than the citizens of the other countries examined here, look to the former Western Germany to cushion the blow.

As the 1990s drew to a close, most of the new democracies were still struggling to return to pre-1989 economic living standards. These difficulties, arguably an inevitable companion of the transition to the market, led many people to feel strongly nostalgic about the 'good old days' of the communist past. This is true of virtually all the countries examined here. Even where voters did not seek a return to communism, they wanted to register dissatisfaction with their current conditions. The Czech Republic, as Jioi Pehe argues, is a special case among transition societies in that there it tends to be only the other inhabitants who hanker for the past. Most younger Czech voters see the communist era as a 'dark age' in their country's history. The Czech economy suffered so much through the imposition of central planning, Pehe says, that the population has been inoculated against communist ideas for good. The same, Shale Horowitz suggests, is true of Slovenia, which 'rejoined the west' with the most advanced economy in the whole of the region, ahead even of the Czech Republic.

Many of the former communist states had had almost no experience of national independence and had to build new state institutions from the ground up. They had little acquaintance with democratic practices and were faced with creating political parties from scratch. Optimistic predictions that party systems and other institutions resembling those in Western Europe would quickly emerge were soon dashed. One problem was that former dissidents, used to opposing the powers that be, did not immediately recognize the need for political parties and were frequently unwilling or unable to cooperate in a 'normal' politic framework. As Louisa Vinton shows in her study of Poland, this was true even in the country where 'communism met its demise'. In some countries, the situation was one of party proliferation and lack of coherence; in almost all of the countries there was a tendency to sudden changes of government, inevitably creating some instability. As Duncan Perry's chapter shows, this was a particular problem in Bulgaria, but Albania showed a similar tendency. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade most of the newly-emerging democracies did have embryonic party systems with recognizable social democratic, Christian-democratic or conservative tendencies. Liberalism was less widespread and several countries, most notably Slovakia, displayed strong nationalist sentiments. There was also a question of how to deal with former communist officials. In some countries - as Tamas Fricz shows in his study of Hungary - this became a major issue in political life, helping to determine party-political differences.

Some states forged quickly ahead. Those closest to 'returning to Europe' scored remarkable achievements in terms of strong economic growth and political stability. On the whole, these tended to be countries that had experienced substantial periods of national independence and economic prosperity prior to the communist takeover and whose populations were ethnically relatively homogeneous. In March 1999, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO. These three countries plus Slovenia and Estonia also looked forward to becoming members of the European Union, even though no precise date for EU expansion had yet been set. Other countries struggled hard to free themselves from the burden of the communist past. In Russia, fifteen years after Mikhail Gorbach'vs encouragement of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) ushered in the processes of change and liberalization that destroyed the Soviet Union, the transition proved especially difficult. The new political elite in post-communist Russia, as Elizabeth Teague and Julia Wishnevsky write, consisted very largely of members of the former communist nomenklatura who had adjusted to Russia's new capitalist conditions.

Romania, as Steven Roper notes, was one of the last of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in which the heirs of the communist regime clung to power. In other countries, as several of the chapters show, liberal governments that took charge in their country's first democratic elections later lost power in second democratic elections to former communists.

Typically, these were reformed communists who proved neither less friendly toward the west nor significantly less democratic than their non-communist predecessors and who could be best described as classic social democrats.

Philip Hanson, in his overview of the economic progress made by the transition countries, argues that the political coloration of a country's leadership has less influence over its progress than whether there is consensus among the elites over how to manage the economy. In countries such as Hungary, Estonia or Poland, Hanson points out, the general case for liberalization, stabilization and privatization was accepted by the social-democratic left as well as by the reformist right. Countries in which powerful figures from the old order retained power tended, by contrast, to be those in which no such consensus about the nature of desirable change existed. While governments have mattered, therefore, and continuous ex-communist government has been bad for economic recovery, the presence of a critical mass of support for economic change of a liberal kind seems to have mattered just as much. (Julie Smith & Elizabeth Teague, Cambridge and London, March 1999)