The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945-1989. (book reviews)

Laurence McFalls, Universite de Montreal

"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." Refreshingly, Jeffrey Kopstein does not trot out this well-worn cliche to denounce, again, the inability of East European state socialist regimes to legitimate themselves through economic performance. Instead, he makes the theoretically more original and empirically more plausible argument that economic decline was a paradoxical source of political stability, if not of outright legitimacy, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and presumably elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. Kopstein ...

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