A. E. Dick howard
services, made more offensive by favoritism to Party elite, led to the bypassing of institutions and official procedures. Who you knew, your ability to network, became a part of daily life. In the legal realm, ordinary people came to understand that laws and courts served the Party’s purposes. Everyone knew about “telephone justice”—the procurator’s picking up the telephone to tell a judge how to decide an important case. “Socialist legality”—law’s submission to Party dictates—reigned; one could not speak, save in irony, of a “rule of law.” Skepticism—of government, of parties, of courts, of institutions generally—has carried over into the post-communist era. Even those institutions meant to be representative—political parties, trade unions, parliament itself—are viewed with suspicion. Richard Rose, surveying attitudes in the region, reports that political parties command the trust of only 5% of those polled, and trade unions, 9%. Likewise, judges and courts must work hard to win the confidence of litigants and others. During the communist era, as in prerevolutionary France, judges were seen to be spokesmen for the regime, hence discredited and, even after 1989, slow to stir trust and confidence. The fashioning of new institutions—for example, parliaments and courts—can be accomplished in a relatively short time, as developments in Central and Eastern Europe confirm. But changing popular attitudes, deeply entrenched after decades of communist rule, is a far more daunting task. It is work requiring vigorous civic education and measured, not so much by years, as perhaps by a generation or two.
Economic Problems
In the years after World War II, the Soviet Union imposed its economic model on its satellite countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The result was a distortion of those countries’ economies. Industrialization was pursued, whether it made economic sense or not. Meanwhile, encouraged by the Marshall Plan, Western Europe prospered. Germany rose from defeat to become an economic giant. As the years passed, the communist countries lagged further and further behind. In 1938 Czechoslovakia had been one of the world’s rich countries in per capita terms, ahead of its neighbor, Austria. Fifty years later, Austria was far more prosperous than Czechoslovakia. Similarly, comparing Spain and Poland, in the 1950s the two countries had fairly similar per capita incomes. By the late 1980s, just before the communist regime collapsed, Poland had a per capita income (around $1,900) only a
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