Forty years after Joseph Stalin slammed down the Iron Curtain, transforming Eastern Europe into a Soviet zone, Mikhail Gorbachev has seemingly directed that the curtain be raised and has urged the communist regimes of Eastern Europe to adopt "glastroika"--glasnost + perestroika. While welcoming any move toward greater freedom, economic or otherwise, most Western leaders have nevertheless been asking some fundamental questions:
Is Moscow giving up some of its traditional hegemony over Eastern Europe? Given the very real differences among the various communist governments, how are they reacting to the call for new thinking and economic reform? What, if anything, should the West do to help Eastern Europe move toward modernization? In this month's Special Report, THE WORLD & I presents the answers of leading analysts in the United States and Europe.
Vladimir Sobell of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty suggests that it is appropriate to look at the Soviet-East European relationship as a loose "solar system" in which the Soviet "sun" exerts a strong gravitational pull but individual East European planets are usually able to work out their own orbits. Accordingly, the six communist regimes of Eastern Europe are responding in varying ways to the Kremlin's call for reform. Poland and Hungary were experimenting with perestroika long before Gorbachev "invented" it. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria have readily adopted the "new thinking" because deviation from the Soviet line would be unthinkable. East Germany and Romania want neither glasnost nor perestroika.
To the question of whether the West should help the East modernize, Michael Marrese of Northwestern University answers "Yes", arguing that the potential political-military benefits for the United States and other Western nations are too great to ignore. On the other hand, Richard Staar, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, asserts that bailing out the failing economies of Eastern Europe would not help the people of the region but would, rather, subsidize Soviet foreign policy objectives in the Third World.
The problems of reform in two countries, Poland and Hungary, are examined more closely. Eric Chenoweth, former director of the Committee in Support of Solidarity, argues that the Polish government is unwilling or unable to streamline the bureaucracy and allow greater initiative. It prefers to dictate economic "reforms," such as price increases, that make life even bleaker for the Polish people. Mark Palmer, U.S. ambassador to Hungary, advocates a wide range of U.S. actions that he says will help move Hungarian economic reform forward. These include the extension of OPIC (Overseas Private Investment Corporation) activity in Hungary. Nevertheless, he concedes, Hungary "has a long road to travel" to attain a free market and democracy.
Gerald Frost, director of the Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies in London, examines the prospect of a "united Europe" and urges caution. A neutral or Finlandized Europe, he says, could be achieved only at a terrible price--U.S. withdrawal and the collapse of the Western alliance. The reunification of Germany is a dangerous illusion, says Strategic Review Editor in Chief Walter Hahn, one that could lure West Germany away from NATO--possibly "the central objective of Mikhail Gorbachev's sweeping peace offensive in
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