Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Have only four months passed since Solidarity forces rejected an invitation from Poland's Communist leader to join a coalition government? Last week in Warsaw, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze conferred with Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a longtime Solidarity activist and the first non- Communist to head a Soviet satellite...
...ideological earthquake rocks the Soviet empire, fracturing the social, political and economic arrangements that have guided East bloc relations since 1945, the first impulse is to check its force on the Richter scale. But the next task, the part where the debris must be cleared away and planners must construct something new, has not been addressed. No one -- not Mikhail Gorbachev, not George Bush, not any of the bloc's reform-minded leaders -- has presented a blueprint for the future of the Continent as a whole. Will Gorbachev's "common European house" mean political as well as economic integration with...
Shevardnadze spoke approvingly last week of the political upheavals in Eastern Europe, maintaining that each country has "absolute freedom of choice." But what if ethnic or nationalist rivalries erupt? Suppose Soviet and East European notions of reform become incompatible? What if, for instance, Hungary or Poland should choose to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact? "We keep thinking that Hungary, Poland and East Germany have hit the threshold of Soviet forbearance," says David Ratford, a Soviet and East European expert in the British Foreign Office. "We are at a loss to explain how the threshold has been moved time and time...
...answer is that significant reform is in the interests of the Soviet Union. It frees Moscow from expensive policing operations and could head off, in Eastern Europe, the sort of protests that plague many of the Soviet republics. East Europeans are far less concerned about a Moscow-initiated crackdown than about a heavy-handed backlash from within the bloc. So is Mikhail Gorbachev. If Czechoslovakia were to launch an anti-opposition campaign, warns Bromke, "it would undermine Gorbachev's prestige at home and in the bloc and make it more difficult for him internationally...
...That remains years away, but a halfway step might be membership in the European Free Trade Association, which has special tariff agreements with the European Community. Such moves would come at the expense of traditional Comecon commitments. Given the glue that binds Eastern Europe -- including everything from heavily subsidized Soviet energy supplies and raw materials to inefficient plants unable to compete in world markets -- the dissolution of Comecon is certain to be a slow, clumsy affair...