Economic and social stability - Preconditions for Europan security

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Abstract (may include machine translation)

One of the lessons that can be drawn from the last three or four years of the history of Central and South-East Europe is the difficulty in foreseeing and explaining the developments in the region, in comparison with the Cold War period, when such were relatively predictable. Nevertheless, this lesson is - apart from the state of war in the former Yugoslavia - not necessarily painful. Most prognoses were namely rather pessimistic with regard to the impact of economic and social processes on the security of the region. One of the authors of this paper, for instance, came to the conclusion three years ago that the new democracies would be unable to rid themselves from the legacy of 'socialism' in the foreseeable future and accomplish the following tasks simultaneously: reversing the trend of mounting foreign debts, halting inflation, privatizing their vast property holdings, halting their decline in economic production, ensuring a continuous energy supply, finding alternative markets after the collapse of Comecon, reorganizing their entire economic administration and creating a new legal system suitable for market economy. According to the above author, if the new democracies did not manage to accomplish these tasks simultaneously, they would face severe economic depression, with all of its political consequences, including destabilization of the region, i.e., social unrest which could lead to the emergence of nationalism and even to armed international conflicts.1 In fact, however, while serious economic decline has been experienced in all former Warsaw Pact countries, no overall social unrest has broken out so far in any of them and their international conflicts have not exceeded the sphere of manageable political differences
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)42-59
Number of pages18
JournalAdelphi Papers
Issue number284
DOIs
StatePublished - 1993

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