It is a salutary thought that last year voters born in Eastern Europe after 1989 took part in national elections for the first time. Young men and women with no experience of life under communism were able to vote freely in countries which, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, had been inside the Warsaw Pact.
To those voters, who have known only democracy and the market economy, these things are entirely normal. The recent electoral success of the Polish Civic Platform Party (Platforma Obywatelska), with its liberal social and economic thrust, was in large measure the result of such voters’ views, in a country with a traditional conservative Catholic outlook.
That alone ought to give some perspective to any discussion of the changes effected in those countries since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The very fact that today we are able to talk of countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania deciding their own fates is remarkable enough; but when we then go on to examine the way a nation such as Poland has been transformed, it is little short of astonishing that so much has changed in so little time.
It is, of course, patronising – and wrong – to lump the former Warsaw Pact countries together. The political cultures of Bulgaria and Estonia, for instance, are very different, and the economies of Poland and Romania have little in common. Poland will soon be an economic powerhouse of the EU; Bulgaria still has a long way to go before it even has a properly functioning criminal justice system.
But there are, nonetheless, a number of important similarities in their subsequent paths. Most obviously, they are all, to a greater or lesser extent, now market economies. Some have gone further and more committedly down the road of privatisation and reform of public services, others have embraced flat taxes; some are unravelling the reforms introduced in the first flush of post-communism enthusiasm. But all now operate within a recognisable framework of Western, democratic, market-oriented economies. Indeed, EU membership – which, for all the institutional barriers the EU can impose, has happened in an astonishingly swift time frame – has entrenched not just democracy but fiscal discipline. This is, if anything, the greatest transformation of all. The need to adhere to the Maastricht criteria and the adoption of the euro have necessitated measures that have provided countries with the foundation for investment and employment. (And provided a contrast with Western European countries, which have not reformed their more rigid tax and labour laws.)
Poland’s success story
Take Poland, which has adapted to its new modus operandi with apparent ease. Given its place within the EU now, it is sometimes difficult to remember that less than 20 years ago Poland was under military communist rule. Indeed, 65% of Poles today back EU membership, compared with just 53% in France. When Poland joined the EU in the first wave of accessions in May 2004, it was not merely symbolic, it was of profound importance to the future prosperity of Poland. In 2007, Polish GDP grew at almost 7%, with unemployment standing at less than 10%. This despite a government that had occupied office with the less than inspiring strategy of Primum non nocere (First, do no harm). Economic reform had been on the back burner when the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc) won the 2005 elections. Rather, it had won power on a pledge to deal with corruption, a prevalent issue.
