TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/071089/07108900.027

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 14KB | 255 lines

WORLD, Page 38

EASTERN EUROPE

A Freer, but Messier, Order  In Poland and Hungary, George Bush

will confront Communism in flux

By Walter Isaacson/BUDAPEST


    In the waning years of the 20th century, the greatest challenge
posed by Communism will not be containing its spread but coping
with its decline. From the bloodshed in Beijing to the political
paralysis in Poland, efforts to shed hard-line systems are
provoking agonal gasps that are at turns cheering and frightening.

    When he begins his tour of Poland and Hungary this weekend,
President George Bush will seek to certify a new era emerging from
these convulsions. For Poland and Hungary are where the cold war
began 42 years ago. And when historians write about the implosion
of Communism in the late 1980s, they will note that it likewise
began when those two satellites meandered from the Soviet orbit.

    Back in 1947, as it became clear that Poland's Peasant Party
would beat the Communists, Stalin's army cut off its phones and
eventually sent the party's chieftain, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk,
fleeing to the West. In Hungary that year, after the anti-Communist
Smallholders Party won power, the Soviet army arrested its leader
and forced a confession of subversion.

    This time in Poland, the opposition movement Solidarity was
able to reduce the Communist Party to the role of a supplicant, and
may end up forcing the country's ruler, General Wojciech
Jaruzelski, out of power. In Hungary, the Smallholders Party is
back, feuding with itself and with the dozen or so other parties
expected to take part in free elections scheduled for next year.

    In both countries, Bush will find the disjuncture between
economic and political progress that has, in very different ways,
plagued Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost-led revolution as well as Deng
Xiaoping's marketplace-led revolt. Poland combines robust political
competition with a downtrodden economy almost too far gone for
reform. Hungary combines an explosion of private enterprise with
a less vigorous attitude toward democracy. The message the U.S. and
its West European allies can bring to both places is the truth that
lies at the heart of democratic capitalism: economic and political
freedoms work best in tandem.

    The political reforms in Poland have the most dramatic flair
of any in the Communist world, in part because they are being won
under the inspiring banner of Solidarity. Roughhewn shipyard
workers such as Lech Walesa and Bogdan Lis survived seven years of
repression, forced the government into half-free elections, then
humiliated it.

    Walesa and his allies are discovering the cruelty of the ironic
punishment that the Greek goddess Nemesis reserved for her
cheekiest victims: granting their very desires. Solidarity's
success at the polls exposes the fact that for all its popularity,
it has no program or philosophy. Its leaders are dancing
desperately to avoid being forced to share power with the
Communists. It is as if the penalty one pays for losing an election
in Poland is having to be in power.

    Partly because of opposition from Solidarity, General
Jaruzelski, the Communist Party leader who declared martial law in
1981, made a startling announcement last Friday that he would not
be a candidate in this week's election by Parliament for the
powerful new office of President. Instead, with Solidarity's
approval, the party is expected to nominate General Czeslaw
Kiszczak, 63, the Interior Minister who won the confidence of the
union as the government's main negotiator during the round-table
talks that led to the democratic reforms. Moscow has invited Walesa
to come for a visit to discuss the political situation.

    After more than 40 years of Communism, Poland is an economic
cripple. Inflation is running close to 100% a year, the zloty is
not considered real money, and all important transactions are done
in dollars. The wait for an apartment is 20 years, an almost
inconceivable reality that dominates the personal planning of most
Poles. The country's underlying problem is that it invested in all
the wrong industries. The state has squandered foreign loans and
subsidized shipyards, steel mills and coal mines. In an age when
information and high technology are the driving force of economic
growth, Poland is saddled with a string-and-can phone system and
a work force that spends much of its time moonlighting as middlemen
for goods and services that no one is producing.

    Hungary also struggles under a large foreign debt. But with an
economic exuberance that matches Poland's political exhilaration,
Budapest is making progress toward recovery. Western visitors who
evince any interest in investing in Hungary are likely to find
officials knocking at their hotel doors with lists of state
enterprises for sale. Hungary now permits its citizens to start
large-scale private businesses and hire up to 500 workers. A
fledgling stock market has 147 listings. Within three years, half
of Hungary's economy is expected to be in private hands. Consumer
goods are expensive, but, unlike in Poland, they are plentiful.
Hungarians proudly use the phrase "like an American movie" to
describe their store shelves and dinner tables.

    Reforms in Hungary were begun slowly in the early 1960s, with
care taken not to aggravate the Soviet sensibilities that caused
tanks to roll in 1956. Today the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain
separating Hungary from Austria has been snipped into souvenirs,
Russian is no longer required in school, the Karl Marx University
of Economics in Budapest has stopped preaching Marxist economics,
and there is open discussion about withdrawing from the Warsaw
Pact.

    Hungary has no parallel to Solidarity's opposition, and what
does exist is dominated by intellectuals. Instead, the push toward
democracy is being led from within the Communist Party by members
of its reform wing, most prominently by Politburo member Imre
Pozsgay. At a meeting of the party's Central Committee last
weekend, Pozsgay was nominated to become the country's new state
President as soon as constitutional changes imbue that office with
real power. The party's other leading reformer, Rezso Nyers, was
tapped as party chairman. The moves diluted the power of General
Secretary Karoly Grosz, who until a few months ago was himself
considered a reformer.

    As Poland and Hungary succeed in charting a more independent
course, Czechoslovakia may ultimately follow -- once it outgrows
the generation of leaders whose power stems from the crushing of
the Prague Spring in 1968. Reforms in the other three Soviet
satellites may take longer. East Germany, moderately prosperous,
puts a premium on order and caution. Rumania, historically prone
to repressive regimes, has been impoverished by Nicolae Ceausescu's
brutal combination of despotism and nepotism dubbed "socialism in
one family." Bulgaria likewise remains an unrepentant police state.

    The East bloc was always an unnatural construct: a collection
of diverse nations and peoples consigned by fate to live with the
occupying tanks of an increasingly insecure empire. To the extent
that this subjugation is dissipating, the cold war is ending. Yet
such progress will also bring challenges in a world no longer
anchored by the stability of a superpower rivalry. The waning of
Communist dominance in Eastern Europe may create a better world,
but not necessarily a simpler one.

    Nemesis may be at work again, granting the West's wish for a
rollback of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. And so as Bush
gives two cheers for the changes in Poland and Hungary, the West
would do well to pay heed to the difficulties and problems such an
evolution could bring. Among them:

    Democracy can be messy. Eastern Europe has only limited
experience with multiparty systems, and there are no signs so far
that Poland or Hungary will evolve toward a Western-style, genteel
competition between moderate right and left. Instead, nationalism,
anti-Semitism, neo-Stalinism and other philosophies ripe for
demagoguery may come to the fore.

    Nationalist passions have been the bane of Central Europe for
centuries, sometimes spilling over to engulf the Continent in wars.
The division of Europe into two blocs served to subdue the more
parochial animosities. But as the Iron Curtain lifts, hatreds may
be rekindled. Hungary's border with Rumania has been closed even
as the one with Austria has opened. A dispute over Rumania's ethnic
Hungarians has caused some Hungarians to ask seriously whether they
could defeat Rumania's disciplined army.

    An end to the division of Europe could create pressure for a
reunited Germany. The history of European wars (and world wars)
has been partly the story of nationalist rivalries and partly the
story of German expansionism. As the cold war ends, Germany --
formally reunited or not -- will dominate middle Europe
economically, politically and culturally.

    In time, there could be a backlash against capitalism. The
excesses inherent in even a successful capitalist system will
create resentments, and may give birth to the sort of extremist
parties emerging in Western Europe.

    Democratic passions are not likely to resolve deep-seated
economic problems. Solidarity's base of support, for example, is
among workers in the shipyards, steel mills and coal mines.
Solidarity is not likely to close down unproductive industries, or
to impose the wage restraints and price rises the country needs.

    Without a Warsaw Pact threat, NATO may gradually dissolve.
Likewise, the denuclearization of Europe could become nearly total.
Appealing as this may sound, it could endanger the armed balance
that has kept the peace since 1945. The cold war was also a cold
peace: now in its 45th year, the era that historian John Lewis
Gaddis calls the "long peace" is surpassing the stable stretches
imposed by Metternich and then Bismarck in the 19th century. One
reason is that nuclear weapons made localized wars and territorial
disputes too dangerous to allow. They also made a direct
confrontation between East and West or a Soviet invasion of Central
Europe unthinkable.

    Under the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Soviet Union declared that
socialism was irreversible, which translated into a decree that its
Warsaw Pact neighbors not be allowed to free themselves of
Communist clutches. Hence the tanks of 1956 and 1968. Now comes
the Gorbachev Doctrine, as articulated in his 1988 U.N. speech:
"Freedom of choice is a universal principle that . . . applies both
to the capitalist and the socialist system."

    Does this mean that the Soviets will let Poland and Hungary
drift as far as they want? Even Gorbachev might not know the answer
to that question. What seems likely now is that Moscow may tolerate
Poland's political pluralism and Hungary's economic
experimentation, but it will be tempted to intervene if either
seemed about to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and expel Soviet
troops.

    A primary goal of the West must be to avoid such a crackdown.
Thus the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have a common interest: defining the
Soviet Union's proper security concerns and ensuring that they are
respected. That is the notion behind Henry Kissinger's proposal
that critics have dubbed Yalta II. If the Soviets felt assured that
the U.S. would not exploit the changes militarily, they could be
expected to allow the reforms more leeway. Bush has indicated
support for this approach; in a speech in West Germany in late May,
he said he wanted to "let the Soviets know that our goal is not to
undermine their legitimate security interests."

    Bush -- and the West as a whole -- should go farther. Poland
and Hungary are striving toward a societal ideal based on more than
economic and democratic reforms. The components: a legal structure
that guarantees individual rights and the existence of independent
institutions -- such as churches, trade unions, newspapers,
political organizations, professional associations, private
businesses -- that prevent the state from exerting a dominating
influence in everyday life. Mark Palmer, America's energetic
Ambassador to Hungary, argues persuasively that the U.S. should
follow Western Europe's example in shoring up this evolution by
creating a web of social, political, business and economic links
to the people of Eastern Europe.

    During the postwar "Pax Americana," Washington's world role
largely involved resisting Communism through a network of military
alliances. That period is passing, being replaced by what has been
dubbed a "Fax Americana." America's influence will derive, in part,
from its role as an exemplar of ideas and a purveyor of
information. Ronald Reagan, in a speech in London last month,
talked about how "electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain
as if it were lace." In Bratislava, Czechoslovak students sometimes
drop by the city's new hotel, equipped for international television
reception, where the maids let them watch the music-video shows.
Recently, the students have been tuning in to reports from China
instead. George Orwell prophesied that advances in information
technology would lead to Big Brother's total control. It is more
likely that, as Reagan said, the "Goliath of totalitarianism will
be brought down by the David of the microchip."

    Understanding the challenges that will arise from the
fracturing of the Soviet bloc will help the U.S. avoid the unseemly
tendency to gloat. But it should not obscure the epochal nature of
the change occurring. Poland and Hungary are abandoning the basic
tenets that Lenin distorted after Marx and that Stalin distorted
after Lenin: a rigidly centralized economy, a one-party political
system and a suppression of personal freedoms. People are electing
their representatives for the first time. They are reading
independent newspapers and starting their own businesses. They are
even tearing down the fences that have kept the world in an armed
standoff for almost two generations. With help from the rest of the
world, these freedoms could be savored long after the problems they
may cause are relegated to a historical footnote.