ABSTRACT
Five years after the democratic revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, it is clear that the transition to stable democracy will be longer, harder, and more complex than was assumed during the heady days of 1989. Progress will be neither uniform nor orderly, as the relatively straightforward tasks of the initial phase of post-communist transition have given way to the more differentiated, intensely political, structural transformations of these political, economic, and social systems. The revolutions have just begun.
Western assistance strategies need to be retooled to reflect the lessons that have been, or should have been, learned from these five years of post-communist experience. Western assistance should try to affect systemic, not just piecemeal, reform in critical sectors, targeting the main barriers to economic growth and the longer-term requirements of democratic civil society. Above all, Western assistance must be embedded in a larger strategic plan for integrating Central and Eastern Europe into a larger democratic community. The essential new agenda—increased assistance, improved market access and accelerated entry into Western institutions— should be seen not as a matter of foreign aid but as a strategic imperative toward a secure post-cold war order in Europe.
177The December 1993 Russian elections provided a dose of “shock therapy” to Western governments and the international financial institutions. The ascendancy of national extremist forces and the flight of leading reformists from the Russian government, together with the deepening economic crisis in Ukraine, raised fresh concerns about the prospects for the post-communist transformations and the efficacy of Western assistance strategies. The instinctive, and quickly rescinded, call of the U.S. government and others for “less shock, more therapy” was both wrong analysis and wrong policy, but it expressed the sentiment of many ordinary citizens, not only in Russia but also among the emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, the strong showing of former communists in the most recent Polish and Hungarian elections serve to remind that the transition to secure democracy is not yet assured, even among the more advanced countries of Central Europe.
These post-communist agonies should prompt a stock-taking of the lessons learned five years after the revolutions of 1989 and the five-year record of U.S. and other assistance efforts in Central and Eastern Europe. These lessons necessarily proceed from ongoing reconsideration of the transitions themselves. Given the limited resources the West has so far deployed in support of the Central and Eastern European transitions, Western assistance will continue to be important but marginal to the efforts made by these countries themselves. Humility, not condescension, is the proper frame of mind with which to reassess Western assistance strategies.
