East Europe's Identity Crisis

...The actors in the political game are lifeless...

...Montias' book has the rare virtue of being invaluable for the specialist and highly informative to the general reader...

...6.75...

...He attempts to describe and analyze the pluralistic forces at work in societies where opposition is not viable, but where political checks, created by conflicts of interest, and political dissent, produced by conflicts of values, serve as a surrogate of opposition, an "outlet for the inherent conflict between the power holders and society...

...All three books point to a central problem conditioning the political and economic behavior of the East European regimes: They are faced with what might be called an authority crisis and perhaps even an identity crisis...

...Political conflict over the allocation of resources, and political dissent fed by a growing pluralism of values are testing the maturity and viability of the East European Communist systems...

...Why are their regimes less popular and less independent in foreign policy...

...They have moved from "system building" to "system management," in Alfred Meyer's terms, or from mobilization of social forces to mediation of these forces...

...Polish, Hungarian and Yugoslav names are consistently misspelled ("Petoffi, Wazik, Dobby, Klisko, Spichalski, Behrman, Wys-zinski, Cruenkovski," etc...

...and "the European Communist states will in the future become more European than Communist...

...One cannot, of course, infer from these more or less overt symptoms of discord that a dispute was inevitable or that it eventually had to flare into the open...

...He is also guilty of factual errors, such as the statement, repeated three times, that Khrushchev was deposed in 1963...

...Ionescu's analysis of the key apparats and the various aggregators of dissent is, on the whole, perceptive and well-balanced...

...In Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia there is a running battle between old-line party appointees in managerial positions and a new generation of efficiency-oriented technocrats...

...One is tempted to agree with Lucius Beebe's characterization of political scientists as "ex-post-jacto entrail watchers" and "after-the-event soothsayers...

...Bulgaria's traditional Russian orientation places it in a far different position from traditionally anti-Russian Rumania...

...Fischer-Galati attempts to demonstrate how in the struggle between "native" and "Muscovite" elements within the Rumanian Communist party, a struggle that began even before World War II, the "native" elements, led by Gheorghui-Dej, managed to win out...

...They seem to be in transition from legitimation based on limited coercion to legitimation based on limited consensus...

...However, the recent Rumanian-Israeli agreements, involving joint enterprises in underdeveloped countries, may indicate that Rumania is exploring a third outlet which would allow it to maintain maximum political flexibility...

...THE POLITICS OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNIST STATES By Ghita Ionescu Praeger...

...As an exercise in Kremlinology it is quite impressive, but it permits only a very restricted view of postwar Rumanian political history...

...Stephen Fischer-Galati explains retrospectively how Rumania's evolution "from a People's Democracy to Socialist Republic" was made possible by a combination of skillful internal maneuvering and fortuitous external circumstances...

...The true test of Fischer-Galati's thesis would come in a comparison with other East European regimes that had a "native-Muscovite" split in their ranks and also strove for economic and cultural modernization...

...One is led to wonder whether his main thesis really explains Rumania's unique position in the Communist world...

...in Hungary the regime is still perceived as a "Muscovite" creation...

...He argues that two irreversible trends are discernible in the area: "pluralization and the reinstitutionalization which follows from it will continue to lead to the dissolution of the apparat...

...Poland cannot pursue an independent foreign policy because its perception of the German threat forces Warsaw to look to the Soviet Union as the only guarantor of the country's security...

...In large measure Montias supplies the economic data and social statistics absent from Fischer-Galati's book...

...They then successfully pursued policies which were simultaneously the Party's historic goals and Rumania's traditional national goals: the economic and cultural modernization of the country, the solution of national minority problems, the raising of Rumania's international stature...

...Each of these has a set of particular interests to defend against encroachment...

...This conclusion, however, is both unwarranted and overly facile...

...The Tito-Stalin break in 1948, Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech of 1956 and the subsequent de-Stalinization campaign, the Hungarian Revolution and the "Polish October," the Sino-Soviet split, the overthrow of Khrushchev and the emergence of Rumania as a maverick in the Soviet bloc—all these seminal developments surprised most political scientists, some of whom then mounted impressive efforts to trace the origins and causes...

...The notion of the "apparat state" is symptomatic of the imprecision of many of Ionescu's terms...

...Ghita Ionescu frees the study of the East European Communist states both from the totalitarian model and from the restrictive and distorting concentration on palace politics...

...How can we explain Bucharest's refusal to go along with Khrushchev's plans for an international "division of labor" within comecon, where it would serve as a supplier of agricultural products and raw materials to the more advanced countries...

...The latter eventuality, whose precise meaning is not altogether clear, will depend heavily on developments in Western Europe and the future of Soviet-American relations...

...This may have been an apt description of Eastern Europe in the Stalinist era, but can it be seriously maintained that Poland, or Hungary, are now concerned with "a full mobilization" of their populations...

...Indeed, they might have to devise a market mechanism for NEW DIRECTIONS BOOKS guiding the sophisticated kinds of managerial decisions demanded by complex industrial economies...

...As John Michael Montias points out in discussing the economic integration of Communist East Europe, "The antecedents, or 'causes,' of an event that has already occurred can often be traced with ease, even though it would not have been possible to pick out the relevant factors beforehand and to predict the event itself...

...If the apparats are no longer involved in social mobilization, but are occupied mainly with guarding their own power preserves, what qualitative difference is there between the Communist "apparat states" and bureaucratic one-party states in other parts of the world...

...Then, too, the comecon countries will be the natural customers for Rumanian consumer goods and machinery, which are not yet of sufficiently high quality for Western markets...

...Montias suggests the Western outlets as the alternative to comecon...

...Ionescu makes much of the "overthrow" of the Slovenian Cabinet by an adverse vote of the Parliament in 1966, but he fails to point out that the very same Cabinet quietly returned a short time later...

...He skillfully compares most aspects of Rumanian performance with that of other East European countries...

...Similarly, when discussing Rumania's problems during the prewar period, the author gives us no idea of their dimensions...

...Furthermore, Rumania may become more dependent on trade with the comecon countries because increasing raw material requirements will lead to greater reliance on the Soviet Union...

...This congruence of national and Communist interests and goals allowed the Rumanian leaders to satisfy the Kremlin on the one hand, and important sectors of the Rumanian population on the other...

...Rumania, though, was the perfect example of a revolution imposed from without and, later on, of a wholly orthodox Stalinist satellite...

...The task of the political scientist, as distinguished from the government analyst, was not to predict Khruschev's Secret Speech or his overthrow, but rather to ask how they were possible, given existing assumptions about the nature of the system as a whole...

...For the function of social science is to diagnose, not to predict...

...He wisely relegates to appendices the arcane exercises in economics and methodology, while providing clear and neat summations of his findings throughout the book...

...After all, Communist and traditional national goals (a rather slippery concept at best) have coincided in other East European countries...

...But some of his larger theories are dubious, and many serious factual errors mar the book...

...The various political checks are limitations imposed on the leading decision-making center, the party apparat, by other apparats, such as the army, the secret police, the trade unions and the state administration...

...In a brilliant tour de force, John Michael Montias traces the growth of the postwar Rumanian economy, compensating for a lack of reliable data by marshaling an incredible variety of sources in many languages and putting together the pieces so that they form a coherent picture of spectacular industrial growth combined with minimal agricultural progress...

...But whatever the conclusion of such an analysis, Fischer-Galati would have done well to test his theory of Rumanian success against the experiences of the rest of Eastern Europe...

...Nevertheless, Ionescu has broken new ground in exploring the major social and political forces that will determine the future of the European Communist states...

...The storms aroused by the Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Mi-hajlov, Cardinal Wyszynski and the Church in Poland, and most recently, the Czech and Slovak writers and Slovak political leaders, all illustrate the validity of the author's concern with political dissent in Eastern Europe...

...Anyone investigating the background of the rift among the members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance [comecon] will find, scattered through the postwar period, telltale signs of the future estrangement...

...The Communist states that have consistently acted independently of Moscow, it has often been observed, are the ones whose indigenous Communist parties succeeded in attaining power on their own: China, Yugoslavia, North Vietnam, and, in a different way, Cuba...

...He tends to take too seriously Jerzy Wiatr's theories about "hegemonic one-party states," which really contribute little to the understanding of the Polish or East German regimes they are supposed to describe...

...Montias shows how the combination of an extraordinarily beneficial distribution of economic resources and an impressive rate of economic growth enables Rumania to retain a fairly rigid, highly authoritarian political and economic system while pursuing a flexible foreign policy...

...When, in the 1960s, it was no longer so important to satisfy the Kremlin, the Rumanians were able to rally popular support for a foreign policy designed to increase the country's international standing and improve its economic position...

...Written from the perspective of the event itself, many of the studies have an air of historical inevitability about them that leads the reader to wonder about the blindness of our political scientists and government leaders in the face of what seem to have been easily discernible trends...

...Rumania's annual economic growth rate is still between 12-14 per cent, an impressive figure by any standard...

...One reason Bucharest maintains a relatively Stalinist internal order is that the "command economy" associated with Stalinism has actually worked...

...Fischer-Galati's book is essentially a long essay focusing exclusively on the internal politics of the top echelon leadership...

...Kadar's formula of "He who is not against us is with us," and the static and cautious quality of Polish agricultural, political and cultural policies demonstrate that these states are content with managing the status quo and are not overly concerned with large-scale mobilization of any kind...

...Involuted sentences, awkward phrasing ("a community of interest with the, as it were, newly self-asserted national apparats") and numerous typographical errors are minor annoyances...

...Reviewed by ZVI GITELMAN Associate, Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University None of the major events in the world Communist movement during the past quarter century has been predicted by Western analysts...

...Political dissent is expressed, aggregated and channelled by students, certain literary reviews, the Church, factions within the parties, and even by personalities like Milovan Djilas or Imre Nagy...

...The future of Eastern Europe will be determined largely by the increasingly intense and dynamic interaction of the forces making for the maintenance of the system and those striving for its modification...

...Ionescu sees the East European countries as "apparat states" that "undertake a full mobilization of the national resources, the individual energies and the minds of the population toward some future collective aims...

...This is not to say that the thesis would fall apart under such a test...

...Ghita Ionescu analyzes the social and political forces leading to greater pluralism in Eastern Europe, and suggests developments arising from their impact on Communist political systems...

...Even if the economy continues to progress, the Rumanians will eventually have to face the problems encountered by more advanced East European economies forced into decentralizing reforms...

...His discussion of comecon and Rumania's role in it is sober, clear and incisive...

...To indicate both the difficulties of studying the Rumanian economy and Montias' success in overcoming them, it need only be mentioned that the value of Rumania's imports and exports in foreign exchange prices from 1950-57 were discovered to exist only in a Hungarian source, and statistics on Rumanian consumption of food staples and textiles were unearthed in a Czechoslovak journal...

...His generally useful outline of the interwar period is uninformed by literacy figures, the size of latifundia and small holdings, or even the size and composition of the Rumanian Communist party...

...While pointing to the growing role of parliaments in Eastern Europe, for example, he cautions that they have a long way to go before they become significant arenas of political debate...

...How can we explain Rumania's neutral position in the Sino-Soviet dispute, its behavior during and after last June's Arab-Israeli war, its trade and diplomatic relations with the West...

...Montias warns that if Rumanian growth is to be sustained there will have to be a "healthy expansion of agriculture, which will in turn provide leverage to boost exports and to pay for the imports needed to keep the economy running...

...It could be argued that Czechoslovakia was already modernized when the Communists seized power...

...303 pp...

...Indeed, one begins to suspect that notwithstanding the current use of systems analysis, functionalist theories and other highly sophisticated instruments of political science, hindsight remains the most potent tool of political analysis...

...Conflict between the secret police and the Party have burst into the open in Yugoslavia, and seem to have existed in Rumania as well...

...the society they attempt to lead remains faceless...