Weak leadership still clouding East Europe economic success

Dictatorships across the region collapsed like a house of cards along with the November 1989 breach of the Berlin Wall. Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and others quickly embraced the newly found freedom to vote in fair elections, participate in public life, travel and do business.

Economic progress, aided by foreign investment and EU entry in 2004-2007, was rapid though uneven around the region. Some of the region's capital cities, such as Prague or Budapest, have income high above the EU average.

Democracy has taken root, drawing in countries like the Czech Republic, on pre-communist traditions. However, in political leadership, the civil service and judiciary progress has been hampered by the tenacity of old ideas and the old bureaucrats and officials who grew up with them.

This suggests the communist era damaged and deformed the nations' elites deeper than it seemed when the Berlin Wall fell.

Vaclav Havel, the former dissident jailed for years by the Communists before he became Czechoslovak president in 1989, said cleaning up politics was much further off than he had thought.

“I admit I was deeply mistaken when I thought this would come sooner. This really is a task for decades,” he told reporters recently.

In Hungary, fiscally irresponsible governments led the country to the brink of bankruptcy when the global crisis hit last year, and Hungarians have grown harshly skeptical.

A Eurobarometer poll published in February showed that Hungary was the only EU country where more people believed that the overall situation in the region was better before the 1989 changes, although Latvia and Bulgaria came close behind.

“Twenty years have passed, and the dominant majority of the Hungarian population regards these two decades as the era of disappointment,” Peter Hack, a former leading liberal politician, wrote in an article that sparked lively debate.

“Despite several successes, the regime change has failed. It has failed because it has not created the more livable country which we desired so much 20 years ago.”

For the last 25 years of Communist rule, Hungarians enjoyed a privileged position in the Soviet bloc. Their liberal “Goulash Communism”, following harsh 1950s repressions, offered a life more comfortable than that in Moscow, Warsaw or Prague. These days, Hungarians compare Budapest with Paris, Berlin or London.

Bulgaria has in some ways shown the reverse side of the transformation. The EU has repeatedly frozen billions of euros in aid since its 2007 EU entry due to corruption. Diplomats complain that organized crime pervades state institutions and reaches into the highest levels of government.

Aviezer Tucker, a philosopher researching totalitarianism, said communism was more effective than other authoritarian orders, such as Spain's Franco, in eradicating dissent and destroying institutions that form the web of a democratic society.

When communism collapsed, the elites that could take over were very narrow. Many from the former ruling circles stayed in charge, and with them graft and poor practice persisted.

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