The Collapse of the Communist Order

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Jackie Byun
Eastern Europe: The Collapse of the Communist Order
1. Poland

  • Solidarity the independent labor movement of the revolutionary demands of the workers who received the support of many intellectuals and the Catholic church.
  • Lech Walesa (1943): led the Solidarity which represented 10 million of Poland’s 35 million.

§ Polish gov. arrested Walesa and other Solidarity leaders, outlawed the union, and imposed military rule under General Wojciech Jaruzelski.
2. Hungary
  • Janos Kadar: legalized small private enterprises, such as retail stores, restaurants, and artisan shops. Under his leadership, Hungary moved slowly away from its strict adherence to Soviet dominance and even established fairly friendly relations with the West.
3. Czechoslovakia
  • Husak resigned & was replaced by Vaclav Havel (1936): a rebellious playwright who had played an important role in bringing Communist gov. down.
4. Romania
  • Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989): established a rigid and dictatorial regime. He ruled Romania with an iron grip, using the Securitate (a secret police force) as his personal weapon against any dissent.
5. The Reunification of Germany

  • Erich Honecker (1912): a party hard-liner who made use of the Stasi (=the secret police) to rule with an iron fist for the next 18 yrs.
  • The Berlin Wall, a symbol of Europe’s Cold War divisions, became the site of celebrations as they demolished the wall.
  • The Christian Democrats: supported rapid monetary unification followed shortly by political unification with West Germany. In 1990, political reunification was achieved by West Germany and East Germany with the West German deutsche mark becoming the official currency of the 2 countries.

6. Yugoslavia

  • Slobodan Milosevic: had become the leader of the Serbian Communist Party and had managed to stay in power by emphasizing his Serbian nationalism.
  • Serbian forces were sent to Bosnia & used Serbian policy of “ethnic cleansing”=killing or forcibly removing Bosnian Muslims from their lands.

o Air strikes by NATO bombers were launched against Serb attacks on civilians → a formal peace treaty, based on the Dayton Accords, was signed in 1995 that split Bosnia into a loose union of a Serb republic and a Muslin-Croat federation.
7. Western Europe
  • The Treaty on European Union (aka the Maastricht Treaty): represented an attempt to create a true economic and monetary union of all European Community members.
8. Germany

  • Willy Brandt (1913-1992): the first Social Democratic chancellor who was esp. successful with his “opening toward the east” (known as Ostpolitik).
  • Helmut Schmidt (1918): Brandt’s successor who was more of a technocrat than a reform-minded socialist and concentrated primarily on the economic problems largely brought about by high oil prices btwn 1973-1975.
  • In 1982, the Free Democrats joined with the Christian Democratic Union of Helmut Kohl (1930) to form a new gov.

9. Great Britain

  • Irish Republican Army (IRA): violence increased as it staged a series of dramatic terrorist acts in response to the suspension of Northern Ireland’s parliament in 1972 and the establishment of direct rule by London.
  • Margaret Thatcher (1925): She became the 1st woman to serve as prime minister in British history. She pledged to lower taxes, reduce gov. bureaucracy, limit social welfare, restrict union power, and end inflation. She was called the “Iron Lady” who broke the power of the labor unions.

§ Like Reagan, she took a hard-line approach toward communism.

  • John Major: replaced Thatcher; whose conservative Party won a narrow victory in the general elections; his gov. failed to capture the imagination of most Britons.
  • Tony Blair: who led the Labour Party & won in new elections in 1997.

10. France

  • Francois Mitterrand (1919-1995), the Socialist leader, was elected President.
  • The move to the right in France was strengthened when Jacques Chirac, the conservative mayor of Paris, was elected President in 1995.

11. Italy
  • In 1970s, Italy suffered from a severe economic recession:
§ Their economy depended on imported oil as its chief source of energy → but a steep increase in oil prices in 1973 hurt the economy.
§ A host of political and social problems: student unrest, mass strikes, and terrorism.
§ Red Brigades: a terrorist organization that killed Aldo Moro who was a former prime minister.
12. The United States
  • · Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC): increases oil embargo and price as a result of the Arab-Israeli War in 1973 quadrupled oil prices.