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Waiting for Godot: Eastern Europe Between Stagnation and Reform
| Article
# : |
13744 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
8,595 Words |
| Author
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Ivan Volgyes
Ivan Volgyes is professor of political science at the
University of Nebraska. This article was presented at the
PWPA conference held December 18, 1987, in Washington, D.C.,
titled "Gorbachev's Eastern Bloc: The Uncertain Future." It
is reprinted from the book by the same title with permission
from PWPA. |
On the eighth day of December 1987, amid pomp and circumstance, glitter and sparkle, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, came a' calling upon the president of the United States. Bearing the gift of an agreement to remove intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Soviet arsenals, the well-dressed and stylish general secretary also brought with him several things that attracted the attention of the media. In order of significance these were a ZIL limousine whose weight was estimated to be greater than that of the president's Cadillac, a wardrobe the value of which was estimated to be considerably less than that of the president, and a wife whose weight--for the first time in the history of the Soviet state--was significantly less than that of the general secretary himself.
Unobserved in the process of negotiating--about both truly significant and weighty matters regarding nuclear survival and insignificant trivia not worthy of comment--was the impact that the lessening of tension between the USSR and the United States has had upon the troubled region we call Eastern Europe. For the fact remains that in an era of lessening tension between the superpowers, new opportunities appear to have opened up for the communist states of the region to fashion a future that would be acceptable, on the one hand, to the dominant communist superpower--the USSR--and would offer, on the other hand, far greater benefits to the citizens of these states. Unhampered by the rhetoric of communist Cold War phraseology, a window of reform was essentially opened for Eastern Europe.
That the states of Eastern Europe needed breathing space has been clear to the more thoughtful observers of the region for quite some time. Impacted by an economic, social, and political malaise, uncertain of direction or goal, these states exist today between two worlds. On the one hand, they still live in the traditional world we have been used to calling "the communist system." On the other hand, being fully aware of the modern world at their Western doorstep, they also appear to have wanted to take advantage of the technological-commercial wonder that has so dramatically transformed the noncommunist states of Europe, the United States, Canada, and much of noncommunist Asia during the last decade.
This essay attempts to describe the tension and stress facing Eastern Europe as it grapples with the questions Where do we go from here? and How do we get there? In Part I we will describe the malaise of the traditional communist world. In Part II we will attempt to outline a possible modern world that can emerge
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