ABSTRACT
Fifteen years of post-communist transformations in Eastern Europe can be helpful, if analyzed critically, in assessing the challenges facing the prospects for democratization in the Middle East. The differential developments in various Eastern European countries suggest the need for a nuanced and measured approach that has to replace the ideological and rather uncritical euphoria which accompanied the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This euphoria was twofold, relating both to the collapse of a totalitarian
ideology as well as to the hope for a seamless future development toward political democracy and the introduction of a market economy. Conventional wisdom linked the two with an almost umbilical cord. One should not overlook the fact that the rapid-and mainly peaceful-
collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe took practically everyonepoliticians as well as academics, journalists as well as intelligence analysts-by surprise. When Mikhail Gorbachev began introducing the changes into the Soviet system which eventually became known as Glasnost and Perestroika, a lot of skepticism accompanied these developments among Western observes. Even those who saw in it the final vindication of the possibility of loosening up of the system by appearing to introduce something like “Socialism with a human face,” à la Dubcek’s 1968 brutally suppressed reforms, had great doubts whether these attempts would not ultimately fizzle out, as did so many of Khrushchev’s steps, due to the entrenched power of Soviet bureaucracy and the recalcitrance or inability of totalitarian systems to reform. Others expressed their skepticism in an even more radical fashion, arguing
that Gorbachev’s reforms were nothing else than a trick to lull the West’s vigilance: communist tigers will never change their stripes. When the final crash occurred in a reverse of the classical domino theory,
epitomized by such high visibility dramatic events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague’s Velvet Revolution, the flight and execution of Ceausescu, and the final denouement of the failed Moscow coup followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself into fifteen independent republics, one could well understand the almost messianic (“end of history”) tones which accompanied these developments.
