My column sparked a fair amount of protest among readers when I recently credited the Republicans with a .600 economic batting average in the last decade. The GOP may have whiffed on the ”fairness” and ”savings” issues, I wrote, but having subdued inflation and stabilized the growth of government, the party`s leadership also ”stood up to the Soviet Union and brought the Cold War to a conclusion.” Standard newspaper shorthand.
Did I really believe the Republicans ”won” the Cold War? The answer is yes and no.
As reporter Carl Bernstein made clear in Time magazine last week, the secret collaboration between Ronald Reagan and the pope was a turning point in the contest between the command economies of the East and the market systems of the West. The decision to support the Solidarity movement in Poland with a good deal of secret aid-in the form of facsimile machines, copiers and personal computers-was one of many appropriate responses from the
administration in the early 1980s.
The decision to clobber the Soviet Union by driving down the price of oil was another. So was the Star Wars research. So was Reagan`s Evil Empire speech. People in government jobs have real power, and officials in the Reagan administration chose to bring pressure to bear on the Soviet regime at every point they could.
More largely, of course, no set of external pressures, however persistent, brought about the disintegration of the Russian empire. It rotted from within. Soviet specialists such as Marshall Goldman and Padma Desai have written good books about the failures of perestroika; they are highly informative about the ins and outs of the Russian economy.
But a scholar who has begun to tell the tale with the sweep it deserves is Charles S. Maier, history professor at Harvard University, and even he leaves out the role of the mushrooming economies of Asia.
In ”The Collapse of Communism: Approaches for a Future History,”
available as a working paper from the Center for European Studies at Harvard, Maier ”seeks to anticipate how a historian 20 years hence or more might seek to place these recent tumultuous events in context.”
The really interesting question has to do with why the collapse occurred in 1989, not 1979 or 1999, says Maier. The answer has to do with the pivotal events of 1968, he thinks.
For 30 years, the communist economies enjoyed growth rates comparable to those of the mature economies of the West. And for that time, most of the basic techniques of repression worked well. He mentions the testimony of a Social Democrat from the quiet Baltic city of Wismar in eastern Germany:
Perhaps 10 of its 80,000 citizens belonged to the peace movement in the 1980s, and three of them probably were Stasi agents, he reckons.
True, there were the obvious internal problems of the Brezhnev era at the end of the 1970s, when detente collapsed and the Soviet economy was gripped by shortages of grain, steel and petroleum.
”But it would be shortsighted to seek the sources of crisis only at the site where the crisis has become most spectacular,” writes Maier.
”Crisis tendencies can metastasize; they originate elsewhere.”
The key to the riddle, says Maier, is to recognize that the fall of communism resulted from stresses and strains that gripped the West as well. The crises of communism were to a considerable extent crises of capitalism, he writes: ”Each system paid for them in different ways. Tracking the market systems alongside the planned economies illuminates why the Soviet Union and its protectorates were so vulnerable by the late 1980s.”
”Decisive rupture” occurred in 1968, Maier thinks. The popular uprising in Czechoslovakia had its counterpart in the student capitals of the West.
The liberal and radical longing was tamped down quickly. But it was followed by the dislocations of the 1970s: the OPEC roller coaster, the international struggle for larger market shares, slowing economic growth.
In Maier`s view, the events of 1989-`90 bear the same relationship to events of 1968 as do the unifications in the 1860s-1870s of Germany, Italy or the U.S. to the European revolutions of 1848:
”Powerful collective aspirations smashed against the structures of society . . . were suppressed, but re-emerged, transformed but still potent after flowing underground for 20 years.”
The big difference lay in the way the governing elites of the two systems responded to the demands. In the West, relative decentralization permitted economic restructuring.
Governments responded to new claims by women and environmentalists, and electoral processes defused the tensions of 1968.
Nations abandoned their ideals of full employment, at least temporarily, and ”came to accept that having a tenth of one`s national labor force out of work for a period of several years was a condition of industrial modernization.”
But in the East, except for Hungary, bureaucratic oligarchies found it difficult to adjust, Maier says.
Instead of adapting, they retreated into the verities of central planning. Instead of co-opting dissidents with positions of leadership, they tried to buy off their artists and writers with travel, housing and Western goods.
They borrowed heavily to avoid the closing of antiquated steelworks of the sort that plagued Oberhausen, Germany, and Gary.
They kept people working, whether as spares or bathroom attendants.
But the challenge of modernization could not be avoided. It merely postponed the Eastern bloc joining the world economy-and, writes Maier, ”that decade of delay cost the nomenklatura their system.”
And so the answer to the question about how the Cold War was won and lost is, I think, that the Republicans who came to power in Washington in 1981 mainly read the situation right. So did the congressional Democrats, for that matter.
It was a bipartisan achievement, as usual.
But as Maier notes, the impulse to triumphalism is almost certainly misplaced.
You can almost read the distant headlines when he writes, ”It is doubtful that the seismic pressures exerted by the structural transformations have finished shaking Western society.”
