Book Reviews: East European Alternatives, Perestroika in Eastern Europe: Hungary's Economic Transformation, 1945–1988, Downfall: The Ceausescus and the Romanian Revolution, ‘Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite’: The Rise and Fall of the Ceausescus, John Locke: Critical Assessments, Volumes I–IV, against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, Quasi-states: International Relations and the Third World, Democratizing France: The Political and Administrative History of Decentralization, Quiet Days in Burgundy: A Study of Local Politics, Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of Constitution
| Author | Ashis Nandy,David J. Levy,L. J. Sharpe,Michael Keating,Tom Gallagher,Nick Wheeler,Ian Harris |
| Date | 01 March 1992 |
| Published date | 01 March 1992 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1992.tb01766.x |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Puliiic*ulSiudies(
1992). XL. 137-144
Book
Reviews
Elemer Hankiss. Easi European Alternutives (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990).
xiv
+
319
pp.. f35.00 ISBN
0
19 827750 4.
Ga
bor Revesz. Perestroika
in
Easiern Europe: Hungary’s Economic Transjormation.
1945-1988
(Boulder,
CO
and London, Westview Press,
1990),
xvi
+
182 pp., f21.00
pbk ISBN
0
8 I33 7752 8.
These two books provide essential reading
for
anyone seriously interested in under-
standing the long-term reasons
for
the sudden collapse of the communist systems in the
states of Central-Eastern Europe. Elemer Hankiss’s book,
in
particular,
is
an analytical
masterpiece which combines political and philosophical insight with an exemplary
command of the statistical and historical evidence relevant
to
his subject. This book is, in
my judgement, a classic that will endure long after we have come
to
take for granted the
failure
of
the social experiment launched in the wake of the Russian revolution of 1917
and, more widely, of the victory of the Red Army in 1945.
Although both volumes deal primarily,
in
Gabor Revesz’s case almost exclusively, with
the case of Hungary, this
is
hardly a disadvantage for readers concerned with the more
general phenomenon of the collapse. For Hungary was the country in which the regime
ranged most widely in attempting
to
reconcile the realization of socialism with the
recalcitrant realities of political and economic life. The very flexibility of its leadership, at
least after 1956, its willingness
to
experiment with alternative strategies in its efforts
to
make the system work, shows in its final impasse the unrealistic nature of the premises on
which the whole experiment was based.
Professor Revesz’s book is written with the knowledge ofan insider. Between 1949 and
1967 he worked in various of Hungary’s central economic institutions including the
Investment Bank and the National Planning Office; and when, in 1967, he turned
to
researching the possibilities of broader strategies of reform he ought to have had few
illusions about their chances of success. His overt theme concerns the succession of
imaginative plans and strategies with which Hungary’s highly sophisticated community
of
economists sought to buttress the established system by producing levels of productivity
and prosperity comparable
to
those
of
Western Europe. For a brief while they seemed to
succeed but,
as
Revesz acknowledges, even the most promising
of
strategies were liable to
frustration by a political regime which could not risk losing its ultimate control of power.
The contradiction lay in the fact that while the political system increasingly required a
thriving economy and a highly developed civil society to achieve its social and material
goals,
it
could not afford to grant them the autonomy they required
in
order to flourish.
Revesz completed his book
in
November 1988. In view of subsequent events the
reference in his title to perestroika is highly ironic. For what the last two years have shown
is that where restructuring has actually happened the political framework which it was
originally supposed to renew has been unable to survive.
Hankiss’s work provides the broader analytical framework in which the tale of
frustration told by Revesz should
be
set. He charts the way in which the post-war
Communist regime suppressed and paralysed the society
it
took
over in order
to
recreate it
in the image of socialism. Alongside this, he notes how different segments of that society
reacted to this endeavour by developing unofficial but parallel institutions which, to some
extent, enabled them
to
survive, though in an increasingly demoralized and atomized
form. Hankiss’s account is full of telling details concerning Hungarian social attitudes
0032-32 I7/92/01/0137-8
0
1992
Political Studies
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