Rebirth of East Europe

THIS BOOK IS NOT WRITTEN BY AN EXPERT ON EAST EUROPE, NOR IS IT INTENDED l for such experts. It grew out of my decision to include East Europe in an introductory comparative politics course. At the time, the upheaval in East Europe was making headlines every day; I could think of no way to make comparative politics more exciting or relevant. I looked for an introductory text and found nothing suitable. Existing works on East Europe tended to be overly specialized studies, sometimes of single countries, that had been overtaken by events. Many of these studies, prepared with great diligence by careful scholars, became irrelevant; Some were based on mistaken assumptions. Furthermore, the leading edge of political science requires its practitioners to theorize too much. To read some studies, one might think East Europe was populated by theories rather than by humans. The net package was a literature that was inaccessible to undergraduates, especially first-time students of East Europe. Many students have never been exposed to the basics that make something like East Europe intelligible. Especially lacking in the specialized literature are geography and twentieth-century history. How many students, for example, can locate Southern Dobrudja on a map? (Even worse, after they have been shown, a few still cannot locate Northern Dobrudja.) Accordingly, an introductory text must fill in many gaps in basic student knowledge. Writing this book gave me the opportunity to return to an area that was of great interest to me many years ago. From 1963 to 1964, I studied at the University of Belgrade, and I authored an earlier book (Other Governments of Europe,Prentice Hall, 1977) that included Yugoslavia and East Germany. It was good to get back to an area that in recent years has not attracted the attention it deserves. For classroom instruction, East Europe and its recent upheavals provide some wonderful examples and case studies of legitimacy (or lack thereof), ideology (or lack thereof), the relation between politics and economics, international dependency, political culture, institution building, and party systems. Especially fascinating are the differences between East and West Europe and how rapidly the former will catch up with the latter. In the course of writing this book, it occurred to me that I was engaged in dialogues with three imaginary figures: one a leftist, one a rightist, and the third an optimistic political scientist. These figures are composites of people I have known over the years. The leftist, while uncomfortable with the actual workings of Communist East Europe, still thinks that Marx was basically right and that some type of socialism, perhaps the alleged "humanist" variety of the young Marx,, is the progressive thing to aim for. But East Europe really was socialism in action: What you saw was what you got. The rightist, on the other hand, is little aware of how bad and backward East Europe was before the Communists took over and, afterward, how difficult the transition from Communism will be. Rightists tend to believe that everything will be great with the Communists out of power. It is not that simple. The sources of instability are many in East Europe, and attitudes and institutions are not yet fully attuned to pluralist democracy and a market economy. Extreme and sometimes bloody nationalism erupted after the Communist blanket was removed. I still hope that after a long and difficult period of adjustment, most of East Europe will join West Europe as modern democracies and free economies. The imaginary political scientist, steeped in theories of systems and stability, for some years thought East Europe was headed for a middle way of hybrid regimes in which the Communists shared power with others. After some decades of reflecting on middle ways or third paths between communism and democracy, controlled and market economies (the purpose of my year in Yugoslavia), I concluded thRoskin, Michael G. is the author of 'Rebirth of East Europe', published 2001 under ISBN 9780130341204 and ISBN 0130341207.