were two giant groups
of nations within which 99% of the weapons of mass destruction and 80% of
manufacturing industry were concentrated. Each group was closely connected
with military, political and economic alliances (NATO and the EU, the Warsaw
Pact and COMECON) with common military and economic infrastructures, with
joint institutions and education of personnel. All other countries and
peoples were dependent in some way or another on these groups. It is no
accident that hundreds of local conflicts during this period were waged with
the weapons of one or other of the military blocs and regarded as the
continuation of their undeclared war. On the other hand, the two bloc system
existed in the conditions of continuing integration and the growing
dependence of countries on each other. This was the main reason for the
general trends of world development to enter into contradiction with its
existing structures. The extent of these contradictions was so great that
there are justifiable grounds to speak of the common crisis of the two bloc
system and, in broader terms, the crisis of the entire modern age.
The first cause which lead to this crisis was the character and
structure of world economic growth.
After the Second World War, the global economic product of the Earth
increased four-fold. The total manufactured output of the period between
1950 and 1990 is equal to the growth of production from the beginning of
civilisation to the present day. There had never been such a turbulent
period in the development of the manufacturing powers of humankind.
Humankind had never witnessed such a period of dynamic processes reliant on
mutual cooperation, discoveries, the multiplication of discoveries and their
by-products. The other side of the coin was that such economic growth gave
rise to enormous deformations. The competition between the two super powers
and their allies assisted in the acceleration of progress but also lead to
previously unknown levels of unbalanced growth. In the 1980's the average
national product per head of population in the industrialised countries was
more than 11,000 dollars. In the majority of African countries this figure
was between 250-300 dollars.
While in the most developed countries of the world post-war development
had lead to an enormous abundance of goods and the domination of
consumerism, in the Third World more than 1.9 billion people were suffering
from malnutrition and disease. The level of consumerism in the developed
industrial countries rose to a level 40 to 100 times greater than in the
developing countries. This process of world development gave rise to the
most unexpected paradoxes. The money spent by today by the French on pet
food would be sufficient to feed the starving children of Ethiopia and
Somalia.
The iniquities in world development have increased during the last
couple of decades. Under colonialism, capital was re-directed towards the
poorer countries. After the war, however, it began to move in the opposite
direction. Large investments began to be made in the USA, Western Europe and
Japan. In the 1980's alone, direct investments in the developing countries
fell by about one hundred percent - from 25 billion USD in 1982 to 13
billion in 1987. As a result of this the poorer nations began to rely on
large amounts of credit in order to be able to feed their people, resulting
in the crippling debt burden which exists today. At present the countries of
Latin America owe international creditor banks and a number of governments
more than 400 billion dollars. Over 100 billion are owed by the Eastern
European countries. These statistics are proof not only of enormous
deformations but of the profound crisis which is affecting the foundations
of the world financial system. While the processes of international
integration do not permit the development of a monocentric world, the seven
richest nations of the world and the 300-400 wealthiest banks control the
lives of the majority of humanity via debt management.
On the other hand, the disproportionate economic development resulting
from the mad rush to purchase armaments and conflicts led to the economic
overloading of the two superpowers. As a direct result of the exisiting
two-bloc geo-political structure the USA managed (or some say was obliged)
to amass huge internal debts of more than 4 trillion dollars. In the 1970's
and 1980's the debts of the USSR increase enormously and delayed the rates
of its development.
A second characteristic problem of the two-bloc model of develoment was
the increase in environmental problems. For the entire period of post-war
development, as a result of uncontrolled industrialisation and the blind
faith in political and ideological ambitions the world lost practically one
fifth of its cultivable land, one fifth of its tropical forests and tens of
thousands of species of animal and plant life. During this same period the
level of carbon-monoxide in the atmosphere increased more than ten-fold. The
level of ozone in the stratoshpere has diminished and humanity is faced with
the threat of global warming. Talk is now of a global ecological tragedy.
Even today despite the growth in ecological awareness and "green" movements,
the world environmental crisis is seen as something of secondary
significance as something less important than the struggle for economic
growth, military strategic stability or national domination. Global warming
as a result of the industrial boom has already had serious, possibly
catastrophic, consequences. The reduction of irrigated agricultural land,
the increase in the levels of the oceans, the dessication of entire regions
which produce the majority of the world's grain - these are just a small
part of the possible consequences.
Despite the potential serious consequences for the world the leaders of
the two systems did not want, nor were they able to take any decisive
measures to allocate more funds for the conservation of the environment and
to reduce military expenditure or to pass common legislation to guarantee
the priorities of human needs.
The third and no less important cause of the crisis of the two-bloc
system was the fact that in the 1950's mankind surpassed all logical
extremes of military growth. The cold war and the opposition of the two
world systems lead the two super powers into a ceaseless race for
domination. This contest reached such a level that in the mid 1980's the
USSR and the USA possessed enough nuclear and strategic warheads to destroy
life on earth several times over. The eight most economically powerful
nations on the earth - the USA, USSR, China, the UK, France, West Germany,
Italy and Japan continually and deliberately increased their military
budgets during the entire post-war period.
In 1984, world arms export reached record levels of 75 billion dollars,
several times greater than the amount of money necessary to buy food and
medicines for the hungry and sick in the world and for investment in the
poorer countries. As a result of the opposition of the two blocs in the
1980's between 13 and 15 million people were employed in the arms industry.
In 1987, the global military budget of the world was more than 1 trillion US
dollars. This extreme overarmament lead to the overall deformation of entire
world development and distorted the structure of industrial production. It
caused enourmous deficits in the budgets of the industrialised nations and
created serious pre-conditions for the future of world finance. No less
important was the fact that as a result of the constant increase in arms
production and nuclear weapons in particular, the level of nuclear security
fell to very low levels. The danger of a nuclear Third World War loomed
greater than ever. At the end of the 1980's the two super powers - the USSR
and the USA had over 12 thousand units of nuclear arms - which from the view
point of common humanity was beyond the realms of common sense.
Thus, the deformation of economic development, the world environmental
crisis, the wealth of the North and the poverty and disease of the South,
the demographic booms, overarming - all these factors are the clear symptoms
of a profound crisis. It is true that all these critical phenomena have been
frequently discussed before and that some of the problems which I have
mentioned here have been the subjects of international summit meetings and
research groups but it is also true that they have been looking for
explanations to these phenomena in the wrong places.
In my opinion the most profound reason for the crises in the
environment, manufacturing and population growth can be found in the growing
inadequacy of the entire two-bloc structure of the world. On the one hand,
during this period, following the logic of confrontation and the struggle
for domination, the two super powers, their allies and all the remaining
smaller countries established structures oriented towards the development of
the economic and military power of the bloc to which they belonged. On the
other hand, the inter-bloc and inter-state power-struggle created a
manufacturing capacity which lead to the internationalisation of the world
and caused world problems which until then had been unknown.
The contradiction is manifest. Institutions, politics, propaganda, the
training of personnel, the links between manufacture and defence were
directly dependent on the profound ideologisation of thinking, while the
globalisation of humanity lead to the destruction of the confrontational
structures of the two blocs. In the 1970's and 1980's the bi-polar world
could no longer cope with global and world trends. This contradiction still
exists today notwithstanding the collapse of the two world systems. The
reason was the impossibility of bringing a sudden halt to the inertia of the
past based in the instutitions, upbringing, education and thinking of
people.
There is no doubt that in the West, and in particular in the East,
humanity has taken too long to come to terms with these problems. Moreover,
subsequent generations will bear the consequences and will discover new
disasters particularly in the environment and as a result of the abnormal
military competition between the two world systems. A number of academics
and politicians issued warnings in the middle of the century. The
scientists' rebellion against atomic weapons in the 1950's, the courage of
Sakharov in the USSR, and the actions of Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russel
and Jacques Cousteau are just a few examples. However, the conditions of
political opposition continue to exert an enormous power of inertia. This
inertia comes from the cultures of the existing civilisation, the
nationalism of the modern age and the world conflicts of the 20th century.
One of the main reasons for the acceleration in the crisis of the
two-bloc system and the collapse of the iron curtain was the growth in world
communications. In simple terms, the growth of radio, television, computers
and satellite dishes destroyed the iron curtain, pierced the armour of the
tanks and lead to the formation of a common culture of integration. The
revolution in communications which began at the beginning of the 1960's
brought about incredible political and spiritual changes throughout the
entire world. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones became a world phenomenon
not only as a result of their musical talent but also due to the new methods
of information transfer. In 1971 I went abroad for the first time, to the
German Democratic Republic. I asked my hosts why all the television ariels
faced west and he answered "It makes the German people feel united."
Television had begun to erode the Berlin wall even then.
After the 1960's and the 1970's people felt a new wave of integration
and discovered their common humanity. This was, however, in sharp
contradiction to the collapse of the world and the structures of the
political regimes. The new generations began to grow up in an atmosphere
which was no longer dominated by the dogma of ideology but by music and
spirituality and the thirst for contact with progressive cultural images.
Clearly this was in contradiction with the two-bloc division of the world
and the division between capitalism and socialism.
On the other hand, computers, communications and new world media began
to exert a direct influence on the human conscience and to create the
beginnings of a new previously unknown global culture. Together with the
globalisation of commerce and financial markets, this raised questions about
the basic structures of the third civilisation - nations and nation states.
There is no doubt that their borders had begun to change giving rise to the
problem of the formation of another world structure and of another political
and economic order.
In the 1960's when the cold war emerged from the ice age and the
peoples from the two sides began to get know each other, the first barriers
in their consciousness came down. In the Eastern bloc, intellectual
movements and calls for more freedom caught the leaders quite unawares. In
Czechoslovakia the Prague Spring blossomed, Hungary began a process of brave
economic reforms and in Poland the workers began to fight for their rights.
This period produced the indefatiguable spirits of Vladimir Visotskiy in
Russia, the "Shturtsi" in Bulgaria and Ceslav Niemen in Poland.
Many people in the West also realised that military, political and
cultural confrontation was of little benefit. In the 1960's and 1970's in
the USA and in particular in Western Europe movements for peace and
understanding gained momentum. The demonstrations against the war in
Vietnam, the youth movements in 1968, the hippy peace movements and a number
of other phenomena were manifestations not only of the political status quo
but also of a new emergent culture. The bearers of the new spirituality in
the West in the 1960's were born not so much in the academic environments of
Eaton and Harvard but in the fields of Woodstock and amongst the millions of
fans of John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Ian Gillan.
At the beginning of the 1960's the president of the USA, John F.Kennedy
was the first American statesman to evaluate the Eastern European nations
not merely as the incorporation of evil but recognised that they had
attained certain social achievements from which much could be learned. Of
particular significance was his attempt to build intellectual bridges with
the East and to break the ice of the cold war. Without accepting the
violence of the totalitarian regimes, many intellectuals in the West began
to perceive more clearly not only the mistakes and errors but also the
successes of the Eastern European countries and to propose the application
of certain of the benefits of state socialism, particularly in the social
field.
Year after year the means of global integration - transport, commerce,
radio and television lead to to growth in international contact and slowly
lead to the blurring of the iron curtain between East and West. With the
appearance of the computer and satellite television in daily life and with
the intensity of world radio television and cultural exchange the barriers
between the two systems became more illusory. New means of communication
made the policies of isolation, concealment of truth and global division
absurd. The monopoly of information collapsed as a direct result of the
revolution in communications which in turn lead to the undermining of the
two-polar model.
Despite everything which I have mentioned until now, is it still not
overstated to speak of the collapse of the Third Civilisation? Am I not
attempting to impose original thought in an aggressive way onto the
evolution of human development? I am conviced that this is not so. My
arguments for speaking of a general change in civilisation will be developed
in the subsequent chapters. They involve technological and geo-political
structures, ownership and the transition from traditional capitalist and
socialist societies and the blurring of the concept of the nation state.
Everything which symbolised and represented the modern age - industrial
technology, nation states, capitalism and socialism and the bi-polar world -
has undergone change. As a result of the explosion of world communications
the process of cultural globalisation has begun to accelerate and what
emerged has taken on new sharper features. This trend has gradually created
more and more adherents of a new world and a new civilisation. Sooner rather
than later the two-bloc system of world civilisation was going to collapse.
The question was "when?" and "in what way?"
Chapter two
COLLAPSE I: THE EXPLOSION IN EASTERN EUROPE
1. DECAY AND DEATH
Between 1960 and 1990 a noticeable gap began to open up betweenthe
socialist
countries of Eastern Europe and the industrialisedcountries of Western
Europe.
At the beginning of the 1980's there was a growing danger that this gap
was going
to become insurmountable...
A
lthough the two-bloc structure of the world was entering a period of
common crisis its disintegration began not in the West but in the East. The
changes in Eastern Europe were revolutionary" while in the West they were
seen as "evolutionary". Why?
In my opinion the reasons for this can be seen in the greater
inadequacies of the Eastern European totalitarian regimes to adapt to the
new trends in world development and to adapt themselves to the new
technological and economic conditions which appeared in the 1970's and
1980's. The Eastern European totalitarian bloc was the weakest link in the
world of the Third Civilisation.
As early as the 1950's the Americans, the Japanese and the Western
Europeans had begun to look for completely new approaches to the way in
which their lives were structured. On the one hand, under pressure from the
new external and internal realities which had to be taken into account and
on the other hand as a result of competition with the Soviet Union and other
countries of the Eastern Bloc, the most developed industrial nations began
to improve their systems. Today the economies of the USA, Japan and France
have little in common with what they were in the 1920's and 1930's.
By preserving free initiative, the industrialised Western countries
managed to overcome the danger of monopolism within their economies and
extreme social stratification. In this way they did not allow the
predictions of Lenin that "imperialism cannot be reformed and will
disintegrate under the blows from its own contradictions"[15] to
come true. In fact the opposite was true, after the Great Depression of 1929
and during the post-war period the largest Western European states and the
USA undertook a series of measures aimed at overcoming the danger of further
monopolisation and achieving greater social equality and harmony. Economic
and political power were balanced through moderate state regulation,
anti-monopoly legislation and the stimulation of medium and small-scale
business.
The most significant changes undertaken in the USA and Western Europe
were in the structure of ownership. After the passing Legislation allowing
the transferring of share ownership to employees in 1974 in the USA hundreds
of thousands of employees began to acquire stock in the companies in which
they worked. Similar trends can be seen in Great Britain, Germany, France
and a number of other Wester European countries. They also undertook
programmes to stimulate the development of small and medium business.
Millions of small companies sprang up in the areas of services, tourism,
trade, electrical goods and a number of other branches of the economy. By
some accounts these small enterprises account for up to half the working
population of Western European countries.
At the same time the large family properties in Western Europe and the
USA have lost the position of monopoly and importance which they had at the
beginning of the century. Today neither Rothschild, nor Dupont, neither
Morgan nor Rockerfeller can exert direct influence on questions of national
importance as they could have done a hundred years ago. This has allowed
Western European societies to halt their deterioration and to stop the
growth of class contradictions and gradually to wipe out the gap between the
different social groups. Thirty years after the end of the Second World War
the nature of employed labour had changed beyond recognition and the
proletariate described by Marx dissolved within a entirely new social and
technological environment. If now at the end of the 20th century one is to
visit the factories of, for example, Zussler near Zurich or American
Standard New York, one will see a completely new type of work force with
different interests and a different mentality and, more importantly, a
workforce which is integrated within the decision making processes. These
are no longer the same workers which lead Karl Marx to write "Capital" and
who gave rise to mass political and trade union protests at the beginning of
the 20th century.
In the post-war period and particularly in the 1970's and 1980's a
process of change in the nature of property ownership began which continues
to the present. This in its turn has had direct ramifications upon the
nature of power. This revolution has allowed the USA, Japan and another
twenty or so countries to adapt much more quickly and effectively to the
needs of the modern scientific and technological revolution and to become
global leaders.
At the same time the development of the USSR and Eastern Europe has
been halted as a result of the totalitarian nature of their regimes. It is
true that when it was formed in 1922, the Soviet Union inherited a poorly
developed industrial base and a poorly educated population but it is also
true that the totalitarian regime established by Stalin at the end of the
1920's had destructive and devastating consequences upon all areas of life.
Tens of million of people lost their lives as a result of violence and
repression - this was as a dramatic feature of the Stalinist regime as the
complete repression of free creativity and private initiative.
Centralisation in the decision making process could only provide temporary
benefits in military and defence issues but in all other cases it halted
intellectual, technical and economic development. From the very outset
Stalinism contained within itself the thesis of forced, coercive growth. The
initial results did not hide the truth that, given time, coercive
development was to become transformed into stagnation and regression. The
destruction of private enterprise, the total and coercive collectivisation
of agriculture in December 1922, the substitution of market forces with
party and subjective criteria and the repression of the intelligentsia could
not do anything but leave a profound scar and cause serious consequences for
human development.
During the period between 1950 and 1960 total nationalisation could
still be explained using complex and serious internal reasons, the general
radicalisation of European regimes (especially in the 1930's) and the
necessity to achieve military parity. However, during subsequent decades the
totalitarian regimes became totally bankrupt. Many people in Eastern Europe
still believe that the collapse in the Eastern European systems was due to
the mistakes made by Mikhail Gorbachev and his programmes of "perestroika".
I, personally, believe that the historical role of Gorbachev was a direct
result of the overall negative trends in the development of Eastern Europe
and the universal economic and political crisis which had gripped this part
of the world.
This crisis above all manifested itself in terms of the dramatic
technological backwardness which began to become apparent as early as the
late 1960's and became most marked during the 1980's. Eastern Europe began
to lag behind in electronics, bio-technology, communications, environmental
facilities and many other fields. Because all these technological fields are
so closely linked Eastern Europe began to fall behind in every other
possible field from the production of nails to complex aviation technology.
The technological advantages of the West affected daily life, the workplace
and management. The rate at which the East began to fall behind in the
1980's was so dramatic that certain experts began to speak of a possible
"global technological gorge" opening up between the East and the West, or in
other words a "self-perpetuating backwardness".
With the appearance of micro-electronics, new communications and space
technology, the Soviet military, who had up until now played a key role in
the political life of the totalitarian state, began to realise more and more
clearly that their economic backwardness would sooner or later affect their
military and strategic position. This was also understood by those
politicians with greater awareness unencumbered by political dogma. Although
the USSR had achieved nuclear parity and, in certain areas, superiority,
with the USA, its backwardness in the field of micro-electronics and
communications at the beginning of the 1980's began to change this trend.
The enormous amounts of money expended on military causes undermined the
Soviet economy and doomed it to universal inefficiency.
In a comparison of figures, it can be seen that while in 1960 the GNP
of the USSR was only about $5000 USD less than in the USA, in 1980 this
difference had reached $10,000 and in 1990 - $20,000. In 1960 the
manufacturing output of the USSR was $1000 per head of population more than
in Japan. Only 20 years later Japan was producing goods to the value of
$11,864 per head of population in comparison with $6,863 in the USSR. At the
beginning of the 1990's the gap had widened to $30,000.[16]
A similar process was taking place in comparable smaller European
countries. The German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland
and Bulgaria were experiencing growing difficulties reflected in the drastic
increases in their external debt in the 1980's. Without the need for further
statistics, I believe, that the most obvious example was the difference
between the type of automobiles produced in East and West Germany. Whether
we compare Wartburgs with Mercedes or Trabants with Volkswagens it is quite
clear that we are dealing with two distinct generations of manufacturing
cultures. My example is based on motor vehicles since they reflect the
general level of industry as a whole: metallurgy, chemical production, heavy
machinery construction, electronics, textiles and so on.. While industry in
Western Europe was already using a new generation of production technology,
Eastern Europe was still dominated by a generation of production machinery
which was physically and morally at least twenty five years out of date.
The majority of Eastern Europeans lived in the conditions of
information deprivation. They were fed propaganda of constant progress and
achievement, the collapse of world capitalism and the greater and greater
victories of world socialism. In actual fact the reality was exactly the
opposite. Of course, many progressive leaders in Eastern Europe during this
period were aware of the problems but none of them were able to release
themselves from the common bonds of Eastern European imperialism. This was
made clear by the fate of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Prague
Spring of 1968, as well as the unrest amongst the Polish workers and the
timid attempts at reform made in Bulgaria in 1986[17]. It was
quite clear that changes could only take place in the context of global
reforms affecting the USSR as well.
The negative consequences of technological backwardness were
exacerbated by the changes in the world economic situation in the mid
1980's. The collapse in the prices of oil and a number of other raw
materials lead to a sharp decline in the ability of the USSR and its allies
to function efficiently and to improve the standards of living of its
peoples. In the 1980's the member countries of COMECON experienced their
greatest difficulties in foreign trade and were obliged to increase their
external debts. From the mid 1980's the Soviet Union and its allies lost
their most important comparative economic advantages and were obliged to
cover their current account deficits with large external loans which even
then came to more than 100 billion dollars.
The nature of the technological changes of the 1970's and 1980's also
raised doubts about economic centralisation. In the 1930's and after the
Second World War technological innovation relied heavily on the centralised
accumulation and management of funds. Energy production, nuclear technology
and chemical production, large irrigation projects, heavy industry and arms
production were very strong arguments in favour of the need for centralised
planning and the active participation of the state in the economy.
On the other hand the technological wave of the 1970's pre-supposed the
decentralisation of the decision making process. The production of software
and personal computer applications, the appearance of tens of thousands of
different types of services and the progress in bio-technology stimulated
and continue to stimulate individual creativity. This was in contradiction
to the very essence of the Soviet type of system.
Consequently the backwardness of Eastern Europe in the 1970's and
1980's was not only a consequence of political and economic conjuncture but
had a long-term and objective character. It was connected with the inherent
backwardness not only of individual areas of manufacturing but of the
primary governmental and economic structures. As a result of the influence
of new technologies on the life of societies, the crisis soon spread to the
personal lives of the individual Eastern Europeans. In the 1970's and 1980's
personal consumption per head of population in Eastern Europe began
progressively to fall behind the average consumption figures for Western
Europe, the USA and Japan.
According to UN statistics for 1960, for every 1000 West Germans there
were 78 motor vehicles in comparison with 20 in Czechoslovakia and 17 in the
German Democratic Republic. In 1985 this figure had risen to 400 in West
Germany in comparison to 180 in East Germany and 163 in Czechoslovakia. In
1960 in the USSR there were 1.6 telephones per hundred people and in Japan -
5.8. In 1984 this figure was 9.8 for the USSR and 53.5 in
Japan[18].
In the late 1960's the economic backwardness of the USSR and its allies
began to spread to non-manufacturing environments. In 1960 infant mortality
per 1000 newly born infants was 26 in the USA, 31 in Japan and 35 in the
USSR. In 1985 this figure had changed to 10.4 per thousand in the USA, 5.7
in Japan and 25.1 in the USSR. Similar comparisons can be made in the area
of science, education, culture and cultural life in general. It would, of
course, be naive and imprudent to ignore the successes which the USSR and
its allies achieved in the area of space research, physics, chemistry and
molecular biology and in certain other areas of technology. These were,
however, rather oases within the overall system rather than its essential
features. They did not change the overall picture of backwardness or its
deepening character.
Clearly, against a background of increasing internationalisation and
more and more intensive exchange of information, the backwardness of Eastern
Europe began to become transformed into a universal moral and political
crisis. In the context of the boom of world communications, radio and
television, satellite communications and information transfer, the truth
could not be hidden for long. The attempts of the USSR and the other Eastern
European countries to propagate lies reached absurd extents to prove that
they were at the head of technological and economic progress. For more and
more people in Eastern Europe it was becoming clear that the backwardness of
their countries in manufacturing and consumerism was a direct result of the
vices of the system itself.
It should be noted, on the other hand, that right up until their demise
the Eastern European regimes retained certain benefits such as full
employment, a low crime rate, universal social guarantees and a number of
other features. The price of these benefits from the 1960's onwards,
however, had begun to manifest itself in the form of empty shops, the lack
of basic products, the low standard of living and the lack of personal
freedom etc.. Given such a situation, it was more and more difficult to
speak of the successes of the Soviet style system against the background not
only of a worsening economic situation but also of the moral and political
climate. The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the uprisings and protests of
the Polish workers, the reforms in Hungary, the dissident movement in the
USSR, the mass movement in favour of emigration to the West was a
manifestation of the growing level of dissatisfaction or unhappiness with
the existing system.
In the 1970's the USA and its Western allies managed to impose a new
leading ideology: the issue of human rights and the rights and freedoms of
all citizens of the world. A number of "capitalist" countries such as
Sweden, Austria and others guaranteed more social benefits, including
pensions, unemployment benefit for young persons etc.. In general, in the
USA, Japan, Western Europe and a number of other smaller countries with a
market economy, life become more attractive and more in tune with the
growing diversity and increase in human needs. In contrast with this in
Eastern Europe and the USSR, there was a sharp increase in crime,
drunkenness, apathy and scepticism.
This lead to major geo-political consequences. After the collapse of
the colonial model, the Soviet Union, despite its concentrated efforts, was
unable to impose its system on the newly liberated countries. The majority
of them adopted systems and models closer to those of Western countries.
Attempts at "socialist revolutions" in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Ghana,
Somalia, Ethiopia and a number of other countries did not produce the
expected results. Poverty remained a problem. The promise of a rapid leap
into the "paradise of socialism" also remained an illusion.
While the USA and Western Europe and later Japan were keen on expanding
their influence in the world via investments, cultural influence and
education, the Soviet Union in order to expand its geo-political influences
concentrated on the support of "revolutionary" regimes, expending colossal
amountsof state money in the process. They maintained the point of view that
in states with poor economies progress could only be achieved via
nationalisation and centralised planning. Life, however, shows that this is
not the case.
The upshot was that in the 1970's and in particular in the 1980's the
Eastern European regimes were in the grips of a universal structural,
economic, political and spiritual crisis, both internally and externally.
Geo-politically this crisis was expressed in terms of the widening gap
between the role of the USSR as a world super power and its real economic
abilities. During the entire post-war period the military expenditure of the
USSR exceeded all permissible economic levels. Military budgets undermined
national development and seriously threatened the future of the system. On
the other hand, despite the economic crisis and evident technological
backwardness the Eastern European governments continued their policies of
universal social guarantees of employment and wages which in the 1980's in
particular lead to chronic increases in foreign debt. Consumption was
greater than production. Financial commitments to the military, price
subsidies and excessive state investments lead to the creation of enormous
budget deficits.
Essentially the system was consuming itself from within. While Western
countries were reforming and adapting to global technological problems, the
crisis in Eastern Europe was worsening. It was becoming more clear that
without radical reforms, backwardness would lead to death.
2. REFORMS AND ILLUSIONS
Attempts by the Eastern European totalitarian regimes to reformwithout
damage
to the foundations of their systems were illusory. These were merely
attempts to prolong the life of a civilisation on the wane.
T
he collapse of the Third civilisation, or if you prefer, its
"reconstruction" could have been an evolutionary process as it was in the
West, through economic reforms and the political evolution of the
totalitarian states. Since the creation of Soviet Russia in 1917 and most
notably during the last decades of its existence numerous attempts at reform
had been made. These reforms merit a general examination and can be divided
into five periods within the history of the Soviet model system.
The first of these was the period between 1917-1929 which I like to
refer to as a time of consolidation and the search for a model of
development. Notwithstanding the civil war and widespread violence the
possibility of returning to some form of democracy still remained. A certain
amount of private property, paricularly in agriculture, had been preserved.
The NEP programme (New Economic Policy) introduced by Lenin in 1921 provided
the opportunity for the use of foreign capital and private initiative.
The second stage of "pure socialism" began at the end of the 1930's
with the destruction of the remains of the NEP and a total assault on
economic, political and cultural life. The coercive formation of the
collective farms, the creation of an enormous army of labour camp slaves,
forced economic growth based on administrative and political methods and the
extermination of millions of political opponents - these were the
foundations of the Soviet Stalinist regime. During this period the Soviet
system developed as a monolithic hierarchical organisation in which the
violence of the party elite and its subordinated security organisations
dominated. From 1930 to 1953 every manifestation of private initiative and
free thought was punished with prison or death.[19]
The third period in the development of the Soviet system began with the
death of Stalin in 1953 and the "thaw" of Nikita Khrushchev. Although to
some extent contradictory, the policies implemented by Khrushchev during
this period were to leave a lasting mark on the further development of the
world. For the first time the truth about Stalin's crimes was revealed and
both Stalin himself and his system lost their authority as the proponents of
social justice and world progress.
The fourth period began in 1964 and ended at the beginning of the
1980's. It was justly named by Mikhail Gorbachev as the period of "zastoi"
(stagnation). During these years Leonid Brezhnev brought a halt to the
"thaw" begun