open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/5098

Eastern Europe in the 1970s

英語

1980

北海道大学スラブ研究センター

Slavic Studies

25

85-125

The countries of the Soviet-dominated bloc in Eastern Europe have experienced important changes in the 1970s, collectively and severally. Having failed to establish an organic bond with its client states, the Soviet Union strengthened its hold on the area through the promulgation of the 'doctrine of limited sovereignty' sanctioned by armed force and engaged in an intensive military build-up in the northern and central parts of the European theatre. Soviet military presence in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary serves the dual purpose of buttressing Moscow's approach to East-West detente and policing the area under its domination. The suppression of the Prague Spring brought to an end an era of comprehensive official reformism which in the 1960s represented an attempt to remove inefficiency, and to attain moral legitimation. Substitute manoeuvres in the economy have been and are being tried but special precautions are being taken to prevent a spillover of economic experimentation into political institutions and processes. The economic pressures of the latter half of the 1970s, which are likely to continue into the next decade, may yet lead to renewed approaches to in-system reformism. The communist parties in the area have by now completed their evolution towards system maintenance ; the era of political and economic innovation within the Moscow-set limits is over. The leaderships, after three replacements of first secretaries early in the period (Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany), have maintained an equilibrium between 'ideologues' and 'technocrats' in their compositions. Aging of the leaderships has been observed, but it does not constitute the same problem as in the USSR. Material standards of the population have improved to the point where the lower threshold of affluence is within reach for large sections of the public. Having fully endorsed the policy of consumerism, the regimes interpret it as a source of legitimacy and a vital ingredient in the 'social contract' whereby political passivity is traded for material security. In the first half of the 1970s, under the combined influence of several factors, the economic performance was sufficiently satisfactory to sustain such consumerist, non-political orientation. The trend began to weaken around the middle of the decade, especially under the impact of the energy crisis. The old ills of command economy have once again affected economic stability and old-new tensions between performance and expectation re-emerged. After two decades of indecision and blind alleying in the Comecon, the 1970s have seen the introduction of intra-bloc economic integrationism, motivated-or so it seems-as much by the desire for political cohesion and central control as by practical economic requirements. In the framework of long-term 'target programs' to be pursued multilaterally by the Comecon, the most immediate 'integrated' activity consists in joint investment projects, mainly to extract and convey fuels and raw materials in and from the Soviet Union. While of doubtless benefit to the East European countries, these joint ventures cost them a great deal and reduce their domestic investment options. Normalization of relations with West Germany and a substantial increase in East-West trading are the two most tangible manifestations of the so-called detente in Eastern Europe. Importation of Western technology (but also grain by some countries) and the incurrence of large debts in the West have marked the end of the erstwhile notion that the communist and 'capitalist' economies would develop independently. While it cannot be said that the East European countries have become inextricably dependent on an in-flow of Western machinery, they do not seem to have progressed very far in acquiring a technological creativity of their own. From the middle of the decade, after some initial braggadocio, Eastern Europe has been badly hit by the energy crisis which created an almost irreconcilabl

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Version of Record

0562-6579

AN0012574X