The collapse of communism

pp. 40-48

in: Feiwel Kupferberg, The break-up of communism in East Germany and Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

It is interesting that in the more successful cases of transformation, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, the former GDR and Hungary, the heritage of previous information policy seems to play an important role (Geipel et al. 1991). Although the informational infrastructure is still significantly weaker in these countries than in the Western European countries, its comparative strength gives these countries a competitive advantage in the now dissolved "block" of former communist countries. But even more important, from a learning point of view, are perhaps the unintended effects of a more "liberal" information policy. As individuals gradually got used to a type of informational autonomy which, if only for technical reasons, had no politically definable limits, this in a surprisingly short time undermined the whole world-view which previously had legitimized the repressive regimes in Eastern and Central Europe and set about a "Tocquevillian" dynamic of raised expectations which left the rigid regimes far behind, thus significantly contributing to their sudden and mostly unexpected collapse in the late eighties.