Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...does not intend to be, but the West is divided by the question of how, and how much, to help the East bloc. One school, which includes Italian Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita, is eager to launch a Communist Marshall Plan to deal with the bloc's $131 billion indebtedness -- a 60% increase in three years -- rung up by outmoded and mismanaged state industries. "An expensive irrelevance," snorted the Economist. Critics are wary of throwing money at Eastern Europe without a clear idea of what they should extract in return. Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wants any assistance...
...most of what the West can realistically do is smaller in scope and largely aimed at nudging the bloc toward market economies. The U.S. is prepared to help, but not with money. "It would be hard to move legislatively," said a top presidential aide, in an era of tight budgets. But, he added, "if they make the kind of changes they ought to make," the Administration would back Poland and Hungary with the International Monetary Fund, support extending trade waivers, increase high-level contacts and boost exchange programs. Ambassador Palmer recommends joint ventures and small loans directed to specific projects...
Private funding can also help. This month the bloc's first privately financed business school will open in Budapest. A Rockefeller Brothers Fund program assists private agriculture in Poland. But so far the private stake has been small. In the past, the East bloc regimes have disdained such capitalist assistance. Now Western investors worry about instability. "If they want new money and new investment from the West, they've got to create an economic and social climate so Western business executives will sense they're dealing with a stable situation, unfettered by bureaucracy, ((with)) a normal return they can repatriate...
...optimists believe economic progress will inevitably provoke political progress. "If economic reform works," says Franz-Lothar Altmann, deputy director of the Sudost Institut in Munich, "it will legitimize political change." The eventual goal is a gradual Finlandization in which certain bloc countries move toward Western-style market economies and adopt the political democratization that goes with them, reducing the adversarial nature of the East-West relationship...
Realistically, there is no intent to pry the East away from Moscow and destabilize the region militarily. But there are those who see every reason to seek systemic change. "Rather than trying to separate Poland from the bloc, we ought to encourage changes there to spread back to the Soviet Union," says Michael Mandelbaum, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Why stop at the Elbe? Let's roll Communism all the way back to Moscow." Unlikely. But if the U.S. and its partners want to move it at all, now is the time to get started...