de Nevers, Renee. Comrades No More: the Seeds of Change in Eastern Europe

International Social Science Review, Fall-Winter, 2004 by John K. Cox

de Nevers, Renee. Comrades No More: The Seeds of Change in Eastern Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. x 305 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $25.00.

I recall watching a television broadcast in the late 1980s of a high-ranking Soviet official giving a news conference. When a Western reporter asked what the difference was between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the burgeoning perestroika phenomenon of the Gorbachev era, the official quipped, without hesitation, "about twenty years." This astounding volte-face in the international relations of the Warsaw Pact is the starting point for Renee de Nevers' study. Her main goal is to analyze bow the Warsaw Pact fell apart in 1989. She does this by analyzing the fall of communist governments in six East European countries in the autumn of that year. This analysis consists of determining who provided the impetus for systemic change and when they did so. Her study of the events and attitudes of 1989, then, involves enumeration of both domestic and external factors of stability and change and how they interacted to produce specific permutations on a general theme in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania.

The necessary starting point for the analysis of 1989 is reform in Gorbachev's Soviet Union, and de Nevers' reading of Gorbachev's evolving intentions and policies is quite accurate. On the domestic front, Gorbachev began with a clear realization of the need for massive economic reform to revitalize the Communist party and the Soviet state. His foreign policy goals were related to this internal agenda: to reduce costs (arms expenditures, troops abroad, aid) and to improve ties to the West by appearing to be a "safe" neighbor to Western Europeans and a reliable arms-control partner to the Americans. Freedom for Eastern Europe for its own sake was not Gorbacbev's aim, but this point, paradoxically, is useful only in explaining why he did not push harder for reform in the Warsaw Pact countries: He pursued a consistent policy of non-interference. In fact, he actually did hope for such reforms, because he wanted these neighbors to become better trading partners. He simply did not believe that successful reforms could be externally mandated. He was also too busy to devote much time to managing Eastern Europe, and he had a visceral belief in the region's ultimate loyalty to socialism. Thus, Gorbachev was able to gamble away the buffer zone, ideological validation, and ego boost that socialism in Eastern Europe had provided the Soviet Union since 1945. This development goes a long way toward accounting for why 1989 was the starting date of major democratization in Eastern Europe.

The author then proceeds to a country-by-country study of the disintegration of Communism. Her approach turns on two questions about each of the six countries: Were they early or late reformers? Did the main impetus for change come from the party or the people? Communist parties in early-reforming countries--Poland and Hungary--believed that they would be able to hold onto power in a changed and more competitive environment, even while they simultaneously saw the inevitability and desirability of major political and economic reforms. The impetus in these two cases was often an "elite-street" mixture, especially in Poland.

Most of the states were late reformers, and here de Nevers introduces a key analytical factor: the "demonstration effect." This cognitive phenomenon (which would seem also to be operative in Poland's and Hungary's early perception of perestroika) influences mostly the political elites but could also mobilize the broader population. The effect consists of observing external phenomena and seeing in them relevance to one's own situation; it expands alternatives, validates new preferences, and alters the calculus of risk. It also produces a recalculation of regime legitimacy. In other words, groups can change their behavior when they are exposed to new possibilities and when sanctions against change are lifted. This was the main external influence on late-reforming states. It accelerated as the number of exemplars of democratization grew, culminating in the whirlwind events in Romania in December 1989.

This sociological analytical construct, one might add, is a common sense tool that is based on the liberating power of example: Other scholars have used it to explain why nationalism was copied (and how it mutated) outside of England and France in previous centuries. Other, nascent arguments in this interesting book highlight the need to explain the varying pace and thoroughness of change across the region by looking at factors such as splits in the monolithic party, ethnic divisions, the state of civil society, and the long-term availability of information from the West. The demonstration effect, as the author notes, could also be profitably studied in the cases of Rwanda and Indonesia. To examine it--and, indeed, de Nevers' entire argument--in the other European communist states of Yugoslavia and Albania would also be a useful future enterprise. Readers interested in other perspectives on this important topic can also turn to Gale Stokes' The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1993); J. F. Brown, Surge to Freedom (1991); Timothy Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern (1993); and, the new eyewitness and grassroots analysis by Padraic Kennedy, A Carnival of Revolution (2002).