Janine Wedel - Collision and Collusion - The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe

American and European donors generally operated according to different projections of how long “the transition” would take. U.S. aid planners appeared to place more faith in change. They designed the aid effort on the assumption that “transition” would take just five years and that assistance would thus be required for a five-year period only. The American strategy was to “get in and get out,” which recalled wartime strategy in the quick and certain impact it anticipated.27 After five years, the recipient nations would “graduate,” implying that, if they completed the American-designed course, the United States would certify them as having attained the benchmark of no longer needing aid. By contrast, Europeans, with generally deeper cultural ties and wider contact with the nations contiguous to the east, conceived of a commitment of a decade or more.

Whatever the time frame, the questions of how much aid the West would provide and the speed of transition became intertwined. The principle was, as anthropologist Gerald Creed put it, “the quicker you change the more we’ll give; the more you give the quicker we can change.”28 If the West declined to send aid or sent insufficient aid, argued aid proponents, the nations of the Second World might fall into a chaotic abyss, suffer economic collapse and political turmoil, and even revert back to communism.

Thus, in the early days of independence, Central and Eastern Europe and the West were agreed: the West would help the East, and the East would show its gratitude through loyalty and quick reform.

THE WEST AS SAINT AND SAVIOR

For the peoples of Central Europe, Western assistance was never in doubt. They were predisposed to believe that the West cared and would fulfill its promises. Ironically, life under communism was largely responsible for this belief: two generations of isolation and communist experience had made the West a potent symbol of both good and evil and a curious “mixture of imitation and infatuation, jealousy and principled rejection,” as anthropologist Chris Hann has described it.29 The West as both saint and demon were powerful themes of life in the East, themes that did not evaporate with the collapse of communism. These themes set the stage for two distinctive phases in East-West relations in the Cold War’s aftermath.

The East’s idea of the West as saint (and the West’s idea of the East as oppressed) provided the underpinnings for a period of intense euphoria, or Triumphalism, that occurred after the collapse of communism. It was a honeymoon between East and West in the spirit of a break from the past and a new start. This phase was relatively short, lasting roughly from 1989 to mid-1991 in the Visegrád countries. The late Rita Klimova, who served as the first Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States after the fall of communism, said that her compatriots then “imagined the United States to be a kind of rich Soviet Union.” Her implication was that Central European recipients anticipated some continued economic dependency, with the West taking the place formerly held by the Soviet Union, but that the rewards for them would be greater than during the period of Soviet hegemony.30 Some observers have compared these anticipations to Cargo Cults.31 Indeed, the model of dependency on Big Brother, combined with ideas of Western prosperity, had formed the basis for aid expectations that would be difficult, if not impossible, to meet even under the best of circumstances.

Isolation, relative unavailability of consumer goods, and generally lower standards of living under communism had contributed to idealized views of the West. Particularly for Easterners who had not traveled there, people in the West seemed to live “the good life,” or at least a less trying one. The West was a source of precious goods, money, and opportunities. In Poland, for example, where the peasantry had undergone nearly a half century of urbanization and many had traveled to America to work, America was perceived as a land of milk and honey. The waves of immigration to the New World (more than nine million Americans claimed Polish origins)32 had mostly come from the peasantry and had sustained contact between Poland and the United States. During times of perceived national dispossession and hardship, such as the martial law imposed in Poland in the early 1980s, millions of households received relief parcels both from private relatives abroad and from religious and charitable organizations. Images of the prosperous West were refined to commercial icons: imported Swiss chocolates, French perfume, German wine, Viennese coffee, Bic razor blades, Johnny Walker whiskey, and Marlboro cigarettes could be purchased only in Pewex stores, retail outlets operated by the Polish government where Poles could buy imported goods for hard currency. Associations with the West, including Western products or relatives living abroad, were status symbols. Many Poles gained status in the eyes of their peers because they had worked or studied in the West or made friends with Westerners.

Furthermore, many Central Europeans had experienced the West as the standard-bearer of freedom and democracy, despite the official propaganda that promoted the West as demon in the game of East-West rivalry. As anthropologist David A. Kideckel has noted:

Generations of communist state leaders used images of the West as bête noire, manifestly for consolidation and maintenance of their own power in society. For example, the chronic economic difficulties and shortages in the socialist states were regularly blamed on the machinations of the imperialist powers, Wall Street bankers, and financial lackeys like the International Monetary Fund.33

This negative image of the West was promulgated through the state-controlled media. However, these media were often not taken at face value: Many Central and Eastern Europeans found the official form of the news aired on television and printed in newspapers in conflict with the facts of daily life. They therefore distrusted official renditions, and, as Václav Havel put it, learned to “live in the lie.”34 This undercurrent of disbelief actually endowed the media with a powerful effect; often, people reactively assumed that the truth was the opposite of whatever the media claimed. In the early 1980s, one Polish physicist who was a visiting scholar in the United States was surprised to learn that racial segregation was a fact of life in South Africa. She had assumed that the Polish media had invented apartheid.35 As Gerald Creed has observed, only after communist criticism of the West ceased to be part of official rhetoric did Central and Eastern Europeans entertain the idea that such criticism could be valid.36

Against the backdrop of East-West rivalry, Western actions during the Cold War encouraged black-and-white views of the West as right and the East as wrong. The West warmly welcomed defectors from Central and Eastern European countries. Radio Free Europe and Voice of America broadcasts presented benevolent images of America and the West. Politicians and diplomats expressed sympathy for the “casualties” of communism. And Western supporters funded resistance movements such as Poland’s Solidarity movement both before and after it was outlawed by the communist government in the early 1980s. Support from outside helped to sustain the Opposition, as one prominent activist pointed out:

The Opposition’s main source of financial support was the West. Donations came from inspired individuals, from subscriptions, trade unions, social and political organizations, as well as from corporations, Polish emigré organizations, and government bodies such as substantial grants [about $1 million] from the U.S. Congress.37

Such Western acts of compassion during the Cold War enhanced the view of the West as saint and played no small role in Central and Eastern Europeans’ expectations of Western help after the Cold War. Many in the East believed that the West would readily come to the assistance of the oppressed peoples of the East.