The End of Communism

Let's go back to what you were seeing and hearing in the 1980s as you toured Central Europe and moved away from your original plans of scholarship. What, in a nutshell, defeated communism? What were you hearing and seeing?

It's a fair question...

It might take an hour to answer!

It would take a long time to answer, but I think the simplest nutshell answer is human nature. The trouble with communism was that its anthropology was wrong. People are neither as good as that nor as bad as that. Beyond that, there are a number of answers. I'm sure that the main answers are to be found in the nature of communism itself and in the success of the West. What we in the West contributed, in the first place, was not any aspect of our direct policy, whether hard-line Reaganite or soft-line détentists. It was the success of the system that we developed, in the United States of course, but specifically in Western Europe -- the West European model, and more specifically, the West German model. One of the great historic changes in Europe after 1945 is the way in which Germany, which in 1945 had been the synonym for horror and terror, became, by the 1980s, a model and almost a synonym for the good things of a normal, civilized Western European existence.

What are your feelings now, as we find ourselves walking through this post-Cold War world, and what is the reader to make of a world now in which the communists have returned to power in Poland? Are you shocked or surprised by that, or is it that you now have to look anew at what you were looking at in the 1980s?

I have to be honest: the return of the post-communists in Poland is a surprise. It is very surprising to me that more than half of those who turn out to vote in the Polish presidential elections will choose a post-communist former apparatchik over the great symbol of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, for all Walesa's mistakes. That's a surprise. But these aren't communists. They're not even post-communists. They're post-post-communists. Kwasniewski* is a careerist, a young man who saw where he'd make a career through the party. He wasn't a communist then. He's even less of a communist now and, in a sense, it is the ultimate confirmation of the fact that 1989 was a revolution, and a successful revolution, that when the former communists come back to power, they can only do so by signing up to the policies that Solidarity and the liberal opposition advocated in 1989. So they're for the market economy; they're for democracy; they're for joining the EU; for heaven's sake, they're for joining NATO; and I do believe that while there will be some manipulation and corruption in the exercise of power, at least in central Europe, when they're voted out of power they'll leave power, and that will be the ultimate proof that democracy has been secured.

And the fact that they're being elected now is a tribute in part to their political organization and to the failures of some of the post-communist policies?

The return of the post-communists is a very big question, and there are a number of elements. One is, clearly, that the transformation from a planned to a market economy has been traumatic. There are many losers from this process -- let's say in very crude terms that a third of the society are economic losers, and the post-communists have picked up the losers' votes. The second element is that, partly for the reasons we were discussing earlier, the former dissidents have not been very good at normal party politics, at building good professional parties, at slick selling of policies. Excruciatingly nuanced descriptions of complex realities do not sell well on the hustings, and the communists have proved very, very good at learning the new tricks of democratic politics. Those are two big reasons why they've come back. And the third reasonis -- again back to human nature -- that the other man's grass is always greener. When people had the artificial security of an authoritarian welfare state under communism, they longed for freedom. Now they have freedom, they long for security, and the post-communists promise them that.

Next page: Defining Europe

*Note: Aleksander Kwasniewski was elected President of Poland in 1994.
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