Postcommunist Transformation Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Postcommunist transfor mation broadly encompasses the political transition to implementing democratic concepts and civil liberties, as well as an economic transition to developing a free market trade economy. The postcommunism transition is widely observed from 1989 to 1992—most commonly associated with the end of the cold war—as parts of Eastern and East Central Europe and most of the former Soviet Union underwent considerable transformations. However, earlier transitions in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and some Latin American states are also applicable to the study of postcommunism transformation.

In Eastern Europe, the political transitions varied from clearly organized, gradual processes to more sudden revolutions and regime collapses. With Poland and Hungary, the transitions were of the first type. In the late 1980s, the Polish government engaged in negotiations with the once suppressed, popular anticommunist labor union, the Solidarity movement. This resulted in semi free elections in 1989, and the Solidarity movement leading the government. In Hungary, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party effectively disbanded itself in 1989, opening the political arena to new and reborn parties of the precommunist era. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) established in 1949 witnessed something closer to regime collapse and the takeover of the central political space by a hitherto-repressed opposition. In the Balkans, an intraruling party coup ushered in moderate democratization. While in Romania, what may have begun as a military coup of the Communist president Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime turned into mass public rebellion and chaos, eventually resulting in the drumhead trial and execution of Nicolae and his wife, Elena Ceausescu.

With the disbandment of the Soviet Union, fifteen states emerged from the largely peaceful dissolution process, which occurred from August to December of 1991. There were no regime collapses, as leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus dissolved President Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet state. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—the Baltic states historically and culturally referred to as the westernmost of the former Soviet Republics—did not participate in newly established former USSR organizations, such as the Commonwealth of Independent State (CIS). These three Baltic states and Russia set themselves resolutely on the path of democratic reform in 1991, opposed to the Central Asian and Caucasus republics, which were more deeply mired in authoritarian pasts and political divisions. Notably, the CIS formed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with twelve of the fifteen states, and is organized as a very loose association of states with few supranational powers, perceived as more symbolic than functional; yet regional powers coordinate on issues of trade, finance, security, and cross-border crime prevention. In 2008, Georgia withdrew membership from CIS.

Postcommunist transformations—opposed to those in the West—also involved the replacement of more-or-less similar versions of the Stalinist planned economy, which was implemented in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s with market designs and practices. Though questions of politicaleconomic linkage and of appropriate phasing of different components of the market reform package persist even today, it seems clear that most states chose to engage in deep, and swift, economic reform on the basis of a reasonably broad political consensus.

Outcomes thus far are diverse and trajectories of individual postcommunist states differentiate in degree of transformative success, as measured by international yardsticks including think tanks, Freedom House’s political freedoms index, Transparency International’s corruption perception index, the Heritage Foundation’s economic freedom index, and the United Nations human development index. On the whole, East Central and Eastern European states, which experienced the imposition of communist political and economic structures for approximately forty years, have done better than most components of the former Soviet Union on these transformation scales.

Geographic and cultural patterns have also emerged reflecting which countries tend to fare better at implementing political and economic transitions. For instance, countries with a Western heritage or with large Protestant or Catholic populations, or that had previous influence from the historic Renaissance and Enlightenment movements, tend to outperform states of Eastern Orthodox or Muslim religious heritages. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Slovakia, as well as Slovenia and to a degree Croatia, typically outscore Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and the other ex-Yugoslav states. Further, on most measures, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova enjoy an advantage over the five “-stans” of Central Asia— Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan—and Azerbaijan. Finally, Georgia and Armenia, located in the Caucasus, typically place ahead of the three Slavic states— Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—but usually fall behind the Baltics.

Bibliography:

Aslund, Anders. How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Freedom House. Nations in Transit 2007: Democratization from Central Europe to Eurasia. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

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