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Should the West Help the East Modernize? Pro and Con Views
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13690 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1988 |
4,138 Words |
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Michael Marrese and Richard F. Staar
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PRO: The Potential Political-Military Benefits of East-West Cooperation Are Too Great to Ignore
by Michael Marrese
To Americans, the question of whether the United States should help modernize Eastern Europe sounds a bit absurd. Suspicions such as the following are common: Shouldn't we modernize Mississippi first? Given the problems we have with federal budget deficits, we cannot afford to finance a Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe. Besides, there is no obvious economic benefit for the United States in strengthening a competitor in the international marketplace. Even if we could afford to assist Eastern Europe, wouldn't the Soviets and West Europeans reap most of the economic benefits? Rather than relying on American assistance, East Europeans should join the world economy by simply making their currencies convertible and curtailing bureaucratic interference into enterprise decision-making. Lastly, wouldn't assistance to Eastern Europe be a means of strengthening Warsaw Pact countries, thus indirectly weakening the United States?
The modernization of Eastern Europe can be defined as an industrial transformation; as a decentralizing economic reform designed to increase the role of the market; as a move toward closer integration with the European Community (EC) and thus with the world economy; and as a natural deemphasis of ideological confrontation with the West. Economic reform and ideological reorientation are internal matters and need not concern Western Europe and the United States.
In the pre-Gorbachev era, when the long-term interests of East and West were more clearly at odds with each other, the idea of helping Eastern Europe was more controversial. Since the late 1950s Eastern Europe has been an economic drain on the Soviet Union. For instance, the Soviet Union has subsidized East European countries primarily by being a net exporter of fuel and nonfuel raw materials at prices below corresponding world market prices and by being a net importer of manufactured goods at prices above corresponding world market prices. The Soviet Union has traded with Eastern Europe under such disadvantageous terms in order to secure military, strategic, political, ideological, and special economic benefits from individual East European countries. At the same time, from a long-term perspective, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA)--the organization responsible for promoting socialist economic integration--has contributed greatly to the technological backwardness of both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Under these circumstances, any economic assistance to Eastern Europe could have been construed as substituting for Soviet economic assistance, thus indirectly aiding the Soviet Union.
The long-term interests of East and West have changed, however. The Soviet Union is seeking to restructure its economy, reduce implicit trade subsidies to Eastern Europe, and reform the CMEA. The West hopes that Mikhail Gorbachev is sincere in his quest for a more peaceful world, and it generally is anxious that he remain in power. Certainly a modernized Eastern Europe would have a beneficial impact on the restructuring of the Soviet economy, which in turn should boost Gorbachev's position at home and, thereby, possibly contribute to a relaxation of East-West tensions. So from a political-military standpoint, a modernized Eastern Europe is not more
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