Revisiting 1989: The Specter Still Haunts
“1989 was not about bringing liberty to the people of Eastern Europe; it was about expanding markets for Western companies…Across the region, German, American, French, or British investors purchased entire industries with the sole intention of shutting them down in order to create new markets for their own goods. In other cases, factories, airlines, or entire resorts were purchased, broken up, and sold of for parts…At the same time, social safety nets were rapidly dismantled. The wild, unregulated form of capitalism that was bundled with democratic ideals and exported to Eastern Europe after 1989 benefited some new elites. The majority of East European citizens saw their living standards decline…
The conflation of social solidarity and economic security with totalitarianism is a legacy of cold warrior ideology, according to which any state interference in the market on behalf of the common good is coded as ‘communist.’ It has been difficult for scholars to trouble this hegemonic notion of ‘communism’ or to examine critically the ways that all of the various experiments with state socialism around the world are equated with the worst excesses of Stalinism…Perhaps the events of 1989 were the product of a confluence of historical contingencies and might have produced a new antitotalitarian political system where democratic state regulation of markets produced a more humane economic system. Perhaps it is time to rethink why Eastern Europe imported this one particular brand of neoliberal, unregulated capitalism over all of the other models available in the West.”
Kristen Ghodsee, in the Spring 2012: Food issue of Dissent