STABILITY & CHANGE IN EASTERN EUROPE

...The paradigms used by the new students of East European societies tend to stress modernization and urbanization...

...The Soviets need the hard currency themselves and may very well soon need the energy resources too...

...they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work...

...The working class, too, has such a potential...

...An extensive bureaucratic apparatus had to be constructed and a very substantial section of the professional middle classes to be replaced...

...Second, in order to do that, an assault must be launched on the living standards of the regimes' own elites...

...And surely, in the East European states no organized, legitimate contenders for power—no recognized representatives of the interests of a large constituency—counterpose themselves to the regimes...

...The fact is that no East European regime has managed to change the traditional prejudice against manual and technical occupations...

...In order to achieve full employment in a society characterized by free, mass education, there is continual pressure to expand administrative bureaucratic and service jobs in order to at least formally employ the graduates of the vast university and technical-school systems...

...For most of the transplanted rural people, the move from agriculture into industry 375 and from village into town represented a vast, although sometimes involuntary social leap...

...It is possible to pick out and censure individual charismatic leaders, but the strategic position of the blue-collar workers within the economy and the complex set of ideological claims that give the regimes a pseudo-workerist ideology make it much harder to crack down on workers than on other social strata...

...The older workers remember not only that they were rewarded by relatively rapid mobility (or at least many who came from the rural areas were)—but also the repressive mailed fist of "high Stalinism," which lasted until 1956...

...This meant that for the large section of the population that was basically apolitical or at least willing to forgo political engagement, these regimes represented an unparalleled opportunity for the bright, the ambitious, and the careerists...

...My prognosis is that the working class will be a source of increasing trouble for East European regimes...

...In either case, the regimes' claim to legitimacy is put into question...

...Quite simply, the population now is far less isolated in terms of mass communications than it was in the earlier period...

...There is another reason why the regimes of Eastern Europe might have to face great difficulties in managing industrial unrest sometime in the '80s: the generational shift within the industrial working class itself...

...Thus social mobility is seen as desirable in most of Eastern Europe primarily because it gets people out of manual and industrial jobs...

...But now the deal increasingly appears to be off...

...If mobility into elite and professional position was the usual reward for the talented and ambitious able to work out a modus vivendi with the regime, a far wider range of the population was affected by the twin universals of Eastern Europe...

...First, an aggressive attempt to get greater productivity from blue-collar workers is all but inevitable...

...However, when considering all the challenges that East European regimes face in this decade, one must be careful not to assume that such crises are fatal...

...This fact underlines the system's failure to develop an autarchic East European economic community and the increasing inability and unwillingness of the Soviet Union to continue subsidizing these regimes at previous rates by providing energy and raw materials at prices well below those of the world market...

...The general point is that for the East European Communist regimes, growth, and visible growth at that, appears to have been indispensable as an element in providing first grudging acceptance and then some elements of legitimacy...

...This leap alone signified a major increase in living standards and located most of the population where services were easier to provide...

...THERE ARE THREE WAYS in which the nonmanualelite —strata now act as a brake on the system's efficiency: (1) At the top, of course, there is the sheer organizational inefficiency of the managerial elites and the planning apparatus...

...In the second case, a prolonged conflict with the regimes' beneficiaries will occur and will challenge their second claim to legitimacy—that the regimes have provided careers and advancement to all who have talent...

...That contract was expressed pithily in the old Polish joke: "Our system is based on imagination and pretense...

...One unifying factor for the East European states that had no large Communist parties—all but Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia at the time of the Communist takeover—was the very rapid increase of social mobility through the party into the freshly vacated slots previously occupied by traditional power-holders...

...Brutality and oppression become thereby more visible, and an ability to compare one's living standard with the rest of the world is more generally available...

...And it is still an open question whether under conditions of illegality in authoritarian regimes such authority can develop at all...

...I therefore conclude that the East European regimes do not face immediate challenges, but that they also do not have the capacity to work out new social contracts and compromises with an increasingly restive population...

...ANOTHER CRUCIAL PROBLEM that the regimes share is a feature of the devolution of totalitarian states into authoritarian ones...

...This means that the East 376 European regimes face an exceedingly unattractive dilemma: either reduce the number of white-collar occupations by cutting back on admissions to the universities through the introduction of competitive "objective" examinations favoring the middle and professional strata—or introduce a class-quota system that subjects an ever-increasing proportion of middle-class children to downward social mobility...

...First, a whole new "class" was created that owed its advancement to the new regime...

...The Church in Poland does have such a potential but refrains from presenting itself as a contender in the political arena...

...Second, the party became the center of notables and the avenue of mobility, and, increasingly over the years, membership in the party had little to do with actual political belief...

...With the exception of Bulgaria and to some extent Hungary, the East European regimes have tended to experience crises of agricultural production rather than confrontations with rural dissent...

...Several results followed...

...After all, prolonged conflict can be handled by a regime that faces no effective domestic challenges to its legitimacy...

...These were societies peripheral to the major European developments...

...But while making it increasingly difficult for the regimes to govern, it has not yet devel377 oped—except in Poland—organizations and institutions that can represent its interests and are able to muster sufficient clout and alternative, effective authority...

...After all, in the first few decades it provided full employment (and it is irrelevant now to cavil and point out that this was inefficient overemployment), near-universal medical services, a vast expansion of educational opportunity, job security, pensions, and an enormous housing program that at least seemed to hold the promise of resolving at some distant point in the future an endless housing crisis...

...Thus today's young generation is facing not only stagnant economic conditions with real drops in living standards but a socioeconomic hierarchy made up of relatively well-trained and young officials...

...Added to these two factors was the population's rapid move from the countryside into the cities and an unprecedented expansion of state power...

...Since legitimacy itself, however, is not a clear-cut category but rather a varying continuum, the useful way to view the East European regimes, other than Yugoslavia, is that they will continue to have highly limited legitimacy, and that their ability to rule will continue to depend on the absence of clear, viable alternatives —and ultimately on Soviet power itself...

...IN QUESTION HERE IS the implicit social contract between the regimes and its working classes over the past three decades...

...I do not believe that the peasantry, if it can be said to exist at all any more as a significant stratum, is a significant problem for the East European regimes...

...3) If the productivity of blue-collar workers is low in Eastern Europe, the productivity of whitecollar workers and professionals is abysmal...

...The social contract implied that in exchange for relatively low productivity and industrial peace, the regimes would provide full and secure employment, with a low but continuous increase in living standards...

...The workerversusregime relationship will be underlined to a point where it imperils whatever vestiges of "workerist" ideology the regime has used to legitimate its existence...

...But an end to isolation is, to one extent or another, a feature of all East European states today...

...This pattern affected all but a very few choice positions reserved by the nomenclatura...

...This in turn means an assault on two bases of internal stability...

...Further, the very social mobility provided through the party has had a fatal or near-fatal effect on its ability to maintain some link with the industrial workers...

...Again, the measuring stick of the prewar years made the performance of these regimes less dismal than West European observers realized...

...We further postulated (omitting conscious and unconscious apologists for a "socialism without a human face") that what ultimately kept these systems in power was the sheer degree of repression available to the local elites, reinforced by the Soviet Union's willingness to intervene massively to preserve the existing order in its bailiwick...

...And in Poland this resulted in the founding of Solidarity...

...Finally, the workers, as a class, are exceedingly difficult to repress...

...This changed relationship to the world market creates enormous pressures on the East European regimes toward greater economic efficiency, both in providing the quality of goods that could be exported and in keeping the costs low enough to make such exports realistic...

...In the late '40s and early '50s most specialists assumed that, except for Yugoslavia and perhaps Albania, these systems were inherently unstable and indeed illegitimate...

...Most agricultural workers either work on collective farms or are best described as small landholders...

...Unfortunately, when the ruling establishment seeks to change one-half of the arrangement—get increased productivity without substantial increases in living standards all the traditional defensive instincts of the working class come into play...

...In the first case, the class and status gap between the blue-collar workers and other strata will increase and become near-permanent...

...This sort of welfare state may seem limited compared to Western Europe but is an enormous step forward in terms of East European experience...

...For that first generation, rural nostalgia notwithstanding, the regimes had delivered a better life...

...It is hard to enforce effective isolation if you are at the same time trying to build up mass tourism, increase your economic ties with the West, and sell your overpriced TV sets to your own population...

...Whether this would be so if the latent Soviet presence did not make such challenges suicidal is a different question...

...Finally, these rapid rates of mobility created a generational cleavage as new contenders came on the social scene...

...Thus neither the carrot nor the stick is particularly effective with the secondgeneration industrial workers...

...It is becoming ever more difficult to expect sacrifices from the workers without giving them at least the feeling that the party will stop protecting the inefficient managers, and that there will be some equality of sacrifice...

...Walter Connor's excellent study, Socialism, Politics and Equality (Columbia University Press, 1979), makes the additional point that the actual rate of social mobility and growth of the East European states has to be taken in its specific local context—that is, the context of stagnant, basically agricultural societies characterized by a low rate of social mobility compared to the rest of Europe...

...This, of course, is most pronounced in the case of East Germany, where 87 percent of the population receives West German TV stations, thus making regime censorship all but useless...

...This is particularly so because, as we must remember, the takeoff point fell into the period of reconstruction of a wartorn society and economy—that is, it began well below the already low living standards of the intrawar years...

...As regime after regime is forced to try to get productivity increases out of a working class that takes its present status for granted, the social contract seems to be unraveling...

...The enormous nonmanual strata of Eastern Europe are not only a brake on the regimes' attempt to achieve industrial efficiency while avoiding a direct confrontation with the industrial working class, but they are a long-range time bomb in their clearly expressed desire that their children shall certainly not suffer downward mobility and become manual workers...

...The rural population is simply too fragmented and isolated to successfully threaten repressive Communist regimes...

...Immediately following the rapid promotion of the first appointees to new positions of importance was a period of routinized advancement, involving professional and academic training, through the universities and bureaucratic services...

...The most important reason is the increasing dependence of East European regimes on the world market and on massive infusions of loans and technology from the capitalist West...

...While this, of course, does not mean that there are no industrial workers who are members of the party today, these workers are certainly not activists and are more likely to represent the pressure of industrial workers within the party than the ear and voice of the party within the plants...

...This second stage in turn has been followed by a current nearcrisis: the overproduction of would-be occupants of nonmanual occupations...

...In the '40s and '50s, a party activist who had been an industrial worker was slated for rapid promotion, which in practice meant rapid promotion out of the industrial working class...

...In any case, one of the major pillars of regime stability has been the fact that careers were open to the talented...

...These are industrialization with its concomitant urbanization, and security with its concomitant of an all but universal, although limited and drab, welfare state...

...By the '60s, however, a new generation of social and political scientists began to turn its attention to a systematic study of East European states and societies...

...2) A heavy burden is created by the economy's vast overexpansion of white-collar and bureaucratic slots...

...The newer, younger workers, although growing up in an authoritarian society, have never really experienced mass terror and take whatever gains they get as their right...