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Foreign Policy
Summer 1999
The Unfinished Revolution of
1989
By Tina Rosenberg*
This abstract is adapted from an article appearing in the Summer 1999 issue of Foreign Policy.
Mao’s prime minister Zhou Enlai was once asked his opinion of the French Revolution. “It’s too early to tell,” was his reply. It may always be too early to judge the fall of Soviet communism, but ten years after the collapse, we can take a snapshot of its current effects.
Communism’s demise has transformed the lives of people as far away from Moscow as Guatemalan Mayan villagers, Indonesian farmers, and Rwandan militiamen. It has altered the way nations all over the world guard their security; international attitudes toward democracy, human rights and justice; and the very nature of global capitalism.
It has not, however, altered them in the ways most had expected. The near unanimous optimism that accompanied communism’s fall—at least among capitalists and democrats—has been rarely borne out. There are some unalloyed victories. Many proxy wars waged by the superpowers in the Third World have ended in peace agreements, especially in Latin America. Overall, global military spending has dropped. Russia has succeeded in collecting the nuclear weapons once stored in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Fifty years after the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals, the world is finally able to unite on new international means to try and punish those accused of acts so heinous they are considered international crimes. And, of course, many—not all, but many—of the millions who lived under communism have more freedom and prosperity today, and some are on the way to achieving their dreams of living in normal European nations.
There have been, however, more disagreeable surprises. The lingering effects of communism dog almost every country to emerge from the Soviet sphere, often to deadly effect. Under communism, for instance, citizens were trained to accept the values supplied by the state instead of searching for their own. A professor of philosophy at Prague’s prestigious Charles University recalled the frustrations of trying to get his students to think for themselves once the old regime had fallen. “They kept asking me, ‘What’s the right answer?” he said. People trained that way can easily be convinced to let new demagogues do their thinking for them. Today, many of them are looking for devils to blame for their troubles in a complex and insecure world. It is an easy next step to Europe’s historic pathology, nationalism.
Many countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic that had some democratic roots or that had a less Stalinist brand of communism are overcoming these obstacles and making successful transitions to Western-style democracy and market economies. But elsewhere in Europe, the shattering of communism left chaos behind. In Albania, and to a lesser extent Bulgaria, communism was so harsh it destroyed the trust in the public good. In the looting that took place in Albania in 1991, villagers burned their libraries and ransacked their community clinics and daycare centers, taking home stethoscopes for their kids to play with or obstetrical gurneys to use as laundry carts.
The prediction that the end of communism meant the end of great ideological conflicts has proved not wrong, perhaps, but somewhat irrelevant, as far more intractable ethnic wars have taken their place. The superpowers may no longer be sponsoring proxy wars, but their withdrawal has created power struggles and insecurity, two elements that have set the stage for leaders to foment ethnic hatred. And predictions of an orderly new world dominated by the United States and the Western democracies failed to take into account that absent the communist Gorgon, comfortable nations will not risk their comforts, and certainly not their blood, on faraway people. Washington has developed isolationist habits—especially when exercising leadership might endanger American soldiers. The first casualty was Rwanda.
Communism was not just a political system, it was a command economy. In general, formerly communist nations have moved farther toward capitalism than toward democracy, with mixed results. Certainly, the failure to create government institutions needed to support and control capitalism is a product of corruption. But ideology is also to blame. Unfettered worship of the free market has done its share of damage. Now the pendulum is swinging back. Economists and policy planners are increasingly recognizing that an effective state is important for a healthy economy. The rise of center-left governments across Europe might suggest a trend toward a capitalism which aims to soften the free market’s sharper edge.
The ripples caused by communism’s fall intersect with those from other events. The shift away from the unfettered free market is just one change in the world’s responses to some of the problems set in motion 10 years ago. But 10 or even 50 years from now, if it were possible to take a satellite photo of world economics, politics, justice, and war, we would probably find that communism, now truly the specter Marx once described, still haunts Europe and the world.
References
Belinda Cooper, ed., War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg (New York: TV Books, 1999)
Timothy Garton Ash has analyzed the emancipation of Central Europe from communism in a series of essays published in the New York Review of Books
Adam Hochschild’s The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York: Penguin Books, 1994)
Michael Ignatieff ’s The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 1998)
Tina Rosenberg’s The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (New York: Random House, 1995)
World Bank’s World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Endnotes
*: Tina Rosenberg is author of The Haunted Land; Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism and writes editorials on foreign policy for the New York Times. The views expressed here are her own and not necessarily those of the editorial page. Back.