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Reforming the Nonreforming Regimes
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17689 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1990 |
2,541 Words |
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Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.
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The remarkable revolution of 1989 swept away nearly all communist systems in Central Europe, only bypassing Albania, followed in February 1990 by the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. What remains is a group of disparate communist states including Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Albania. These countries share the common fate of having governments based on political elites espousing Marxist-Leninists principles and imposing on their people a repressive political and economic system. As such, they appear increasingly to be anachronisms - out of step with the dramatic changes that are sweeping regions extending from the Western Hemisphere to Europe and the Asia-Pacific area.
Once seen as a vanguard of Soviet power posing a threat to U.S. interests in its own from yard, Fidel Castro's Cuba now seems more relic of a failed political-economic experiment than a model for revolutionary change. China's domestic retreat back toward the communist political orthodoxy of its early decades in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre has served only to point up the widening gap separating its present leadership and nearly all other states of the Pacific Rim. Clearly, the rising tide represented by the revolutionary forces that have altered the international landscape from Managua to Bucharest has had an unequal impact on communist structures around the world.
Those communist regimes in Europe that have been replaced by democratic forces pressing for political pluralism and market economies shared the common fate of having been occupied by the Soviet Union and its communist cadres as a result of World War II. Once Mikhail Gorbachev made clear that Moscow was no longer able or willing to make Soviet military forces available to keep them in power - as had his predecessors in the case of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 - they fell like a house of cards. In retrospect, all these regimes lacked the political legitimacy, or popular acceptability, conferred by truly free elections providing periodic tests of accountability for their leaders.
Moreover, it had proven increasingly difficult over time to isolate the peoples of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain that had been erected as a barrier to what the ruling communist elites regarded as political contamination from the outside world. By the time the East Germans communist regime fell in late 1989, nearly all East Germans had been able for years to receive West German television broadcasts. As a result, they had undoubtedly been exposed visually to West German political figures more constantly than to their own government elites and been shown by vivid contrast the drabness of their own existence. The pace of contracts from the West elsewhere in Central Europe had quickened as well as result of the growing impact of information and communication technologies.
An assessment of those factors that appear decisively to have contributed to the fall of communist regimes in resent months is a necessary prerequisite to developing U.S. policy toward residual Marxist-Leninist-style states whose political systems, it is hoped, will be similarly transformed.
To the extent that the United States had a coherent and constant strategy, it was that of containment, whose purpose was to thwart the expansion of communism, whether directed from Moscow itself or through intermediaries such as Cuba. In the final analysis, it was a combination of
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