Word: capitalist
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Elsewhere in what was once the Soviet bloc, the road to capitalist democracy is turning out to be strewn with pitfalls, detours and an occasional reversal. Hardly anyone in the former Soviet republics or the onetime satellite states of Eastern Europe is openly advocating a return to communism -- by that name. But in some countries, the communists who now call themselves socialists have given up hardly any of their control of economic, political and social life. President Ion Iliescu rules Romania less brutally than did his executed predecessor, Nicolae Ceausescu, but with as keen a will to block all reform...
Diverse though these troubles are, they have some common denominators. The former Soviet republics and satellites that are trying to build capitalist democracies must do so from scratch, with little or no experience in either capitalism or democracy. They are getting precious little help from their cold-war adversaries, who sometimes seem to enforce a double standard. Western governments may, for example, demand that to qualify for aid an ex-communist country reduce its agricultural subsidies to a level well below the largesse that the West showers on its farmers. Worse, in order to keep their countries operating, democratic leaders...
...Western economists who think such a development might not be all bad. Says Paul Craig Roberts, a political economist at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies: "I meet these people all the time. Some of them are rather entrepreneurial" and are beginning to act more like capitalist businessmen than like communist apparatchiks...
...They have struck for wage increases that, in the opinion of Lech Walesa, the founder of Solidarity who is now President of Poland, could be met only by "printing money." That, says Walesa, would "ruin all our achievements so far." Suchocka's government has resorted to the hard-boiled capitalist expedient of threatening to fire strikers at an auto-parts plant and a coal mine. The threat helped end those strikes, but future relations between labor and management are still problematic...
...fact, is the fate of political and economic reform throughout the former Soviet bloc. At best, its countries probably will not and cannot become carbon copies of Western capitalist democracies. At worst, they are unlikely to revert to old-fashioned Marxism-Leninism in any form that would threaten a new cold war. But whether the hybrid political economies that do evolve represent a net gain for political and economic freedom or a descent into a kind of authoritarian chaos remains an unsettled question...