1 - The Collapse of Socialism and Socialist States

Summary

Political systems are not in the habit of committing suicide.

Milovan Djilas (1988)

From 1989 to 1990 socialism collapsed throughout the territories that, during the cold war era, had comprised the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. What followed was the formation of new regimes committed, albeit in quite varying degrees, to the construction of liberal economic and political orders (Dawisha, 1997; Roeder, 1994). Although the success of these regime experiments has yet to be determined, particularly in those cases where the ex-Communists won the first competitive elections (see especially Fish, 1998; Bunce, 1995a), the future of European socialism – in its dictatorial form – is no longer in question. It has vanished from the entire region, after having defined for forty-five years not just the political economy of the eastern half of Europe, but also the very structure, if not the stability, of the postwar international order.

What quickly followed these developments was another set of equally abrupt and perhaps even more surprising changes: the termination of four states in the region. The first to go was the German Democratic Republic, which in September 1990 joined its neighbor, the German Federal Republic, to form a single state. While the speed of German unification was unexpected and had a great deal to do with the convergence between Chancellor Helmut Kohl's “chutzpah” and President Gorbachev's reform needs, the fact of it was not (see, e.g., McAdams, 1997; Levesque, 1997).