New strength percolates in East Europe (1)

This is the first of two installments of an article written by Czech President Vaclav Havel on the changes that are taking place in Eastern and Central Europe.

GROZNY, Czech: Changes taking place in countries of Central and Eastern Europe still attract a high degree of attention, five years after they started -- as the continuing use of the term "post-communist" countries seems to testify. The focus of that attention has, however, moved away from basic principles of transformation, which have apparently already found their mode of solution in most of the countries concerned.

The market has been reopened to free enterprise; privatization and restructuring of industry are well under way; and the newly reformed economies, following the breakdown of the regulated Eastern market, are trying to find their place in the trade framework of Western Europe, East Asia and America.

It is amazing to see how even after decades of centrally managed economies, how the enterprising spirit of the people has come vigorously back to life. Today you can find hundreds of thousands of private entrepreneurs in the Czech Republic alone, a country where until recently we thought hardly anyone knew what a share really is.

This creative enterprising fervor is definitely an encouraging sign that people have begun to accept the idea that individual effort and self-reliance are things that matter most, and that after years of anonymous ownership, their relation to property is acquiring the nature of a personal link and responsibility.

To be able to appreciate fully the extent of this great leap forward we have to bear in mind that communism was a totalitarian system greatly different from other comparable non-democratic systems in the world. It differed substantially from the class- style dictatorship of a junta or other authoritarian regime. It was different too from the German Nazi system, also labeled totalitarian.

The greatest difference lies in the fact that it pervaded in a peculiar way all spheres of social life, thus manipulating society simultaneously by multiple indirect tools. For example: All private property in communist countries was nationalized, while the Nazi regime never contemplated such a move.

The communist state, by regulating each and every activity, such as social groupings, travel abroad, access to education, etc. managed to penetrate into the finest tissue of society. It was a system dangerous in the way it humiliated people while sucking them in a way that made them co-responsible for the system.

It relied on Marxist philosophy, the practice of which, unless experienced personally, easily carries a certain attraction both for intellectuals as well as workers, because of its promises of social justice and simple solution to all the ages-old woes of man. Our society has been sufficiently purged of communism, as it was first of all a suppressive system, not just a rhetoric spread daily through mass media that sickened most citizens.

Other so-called post-communist countries cope in their way with similar transformational tasks. In each of them the process assumes different forms and follows a different schedule and in the countries I have particularly in mind, signs of differentiation in approach start to become visible. Communists, to an outside observer, all looked more or less the same. Everything was so uniform that differences between individual countries were barely discernible. Only now, with the advent of freedom, do the diversity of traditions, social conditions, ingrained behavioral patterns, etc. become apparent.

The West, closely watching the metamorphosis of Central and Eastern Europe, has recently become apprehensive about a swing to the left in the electoral preferences of voters in some of the post-communist countries. Journalists, for instance, have started to pose the question of whether the latest election results in those countries do not herald some sort of return to communism.

I don't think the election victories of leftist parties in, for example, Poland or Hungary will mean anything like a return to communism or a nostalgia trip, nor even a slow-down of reforms. I would rather take this change of view of a certain part of the electorate as a positive sign of stabilization of democracy, wherein the periodical interchange of left and right- leaning parties takes place regularly.

The Hungarian and Polish leftist parties came up with a program that is basically social democratic, with no sigh of the slightest intention to put a stop to the reforms or change their countries' respective foreign policy trends. A certain inclination to the left in some of these countries is a natural reaction that was to be expected. When Winston Churchill won World War II, the British reacted by Choosing Clement Attlee for prime minister. But that is how it goes in democracies.

When I think about things taking a similar course in the Czech Republic, my conclusion is that the political pendulum will not take any leftward swing in the foreseeable future. I have various grounds, including historical ones, to support this view. Unlike Poland or Hungary, where strong reformist wings have always existed right inside the communist parties, former Czechoslovakia had probably the most conservative communist regime within the bloc. The system was moreover so corrupt and rotten to the core, that it is a hell of a job for any of its successors to delete the record.

The former Communist party of Czechoslovakia has split into three minor parties, which even if they join forces can hardly aspire to influence election results. Unlike what happened in Slovakia, nothing like a really influential reformist party capable of using its electorate to support a program that sounds social-democratic emerged out the remnants of the Czech Communist Party, but that is what actually happened in Slovakia, Poland and Hungary.

Even now, the Czech Communist Party remains conservative, gathering its supporters from among the elderly and unable to part with lifelong beliefs. The other two lesser faction parties pose so little danger to democracy that they can easily be left to continue their existence as part of the system.

By some strange twist of the law or paradox, all of the "healthiest" surviving former communists have long ago switched over to capitalism and, having briskly realized its advantages for their own future good, they generally vote for parties furthest to the right these days. One thing not to be left unmentioned in this connection is that the weakness of the left is a sort of a blessing too: Having a relatively stable rightist government, our economic reforms do not lack speed or conception.

-- The Daily Yomiuri