Word: reform
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...East European state reject reform and still thrive? Yes, says the doctrinaire regime of East Germany's party boss Erich Honecker. The leadership in Berlin has stuck faithfully to the eternal Communist verities and pulled off a hat trick. Under one of the most authoritarian systems in the Warsaw Pact and with a rigid, centrally planned economy to match, East Germany boasts the most powerful industrial base, the highest standard of living and the most per capita exports to the West of any nation in the East bloc. Declared Honecker, 76, in a speech to party leaders that implicitly rejected...
...Communist Yugoslavia, not a member of the Soviet satellite bloc, reform moves have opened yawning rifts between the country's eight diverse republics and provinces and a flock of feuding ethnic groups. Serbian nationalists, led by the charismatic Slobodan Milossevic, are pursuing a dream of dominance in one part of the country, while a divided national leadership is struggling to stave off collapse of the Yugoslav economy...
...sparks thrown off by the widely divergent policies have ignited a sputtering fuse in the region that could lead to a dangerous explosion. The satellites, no longer forced to operate under the delusion that Communism works, have been given a historic chance to pursue, within undefined limits, their own reform policies. But if Gorbachev is willing to countenance some degree of free play country by country, he seems unlikely to permit any to opt out of the Warsaw Pact...
...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...
...added that the pace of reform in the Soviet Union remains slow. "It's one thing to proclaim a set of new ideas--it's quite another to transform them into a new set of textbooks," Nikandrov said...