De l'utopie à la société « pragmatique » : conséquences sociales des réformes économiques en Europe de l'Est
Authors: Connor Walter D. 
Published: November 2010

The outcome of World War II brought a new political order to the nations of Eastern Europe : an order which, due to its ideological bases and emphasis on transformation of man and society, may be called "Utopian". A primary expression of this Utopia was the Soviet-style command economy, transported from the land of its invention and grafted onto the new socialist states.

This essay, which deals with the broad social consequences of economic reform in East Europe, views reform as a process of dismantling the command economy — a process called forth by the recognition that the promised Utopia is false, and that the economic arrangements linked with its attainment fail to meet the contemporary economic needs of the socialist states. Just as the social consequences of the command economy have shaped, to a significant degree, everyday life in East Europe, so do the consequences of reform promise to change that life. The main focus of the essay is on the Hungarian reform — the New Economic Mechanism — in effect since 1968, as a "case" with potential relevance for other socialist states whose reforms have not yet gone so far.

The command economy, in Hungary as elsewhere, was marked by low living standards, a certain amount of egalitarianism in economic rewards combined with job security, an underprovisioning of the service and consumer goods sectors, and chronic problems of housing shortage. Perhaps most critically of all its impacts, the logic of reform challenges the egalitarianism (though at low average pay levels) and job security (rooted in a tolerance for disguised underemployment and low labor productivity) which have provided much of whatever working-class support exists for the East European regimes. The threat of increased income differentials, of "efficiency" criteria, confronts a "populist" form of egalitarianism widespread among the working class, to whom equality of opportunity seems not so important as equality of result. These, and other consequences of allowing freer play to quasi-market mechanism (such as increased peasant incomes via higher produce prices, differentiation in housing as it moves toward becoming a "market" rather than a "welfare" item, etc.) imply changes in the hither to relatively stable positions of social strata.

Such changes are matters of controversy, and reform has both its defenders (reform economists themselves, the professional intelligentsia and certain other groups who perceive benefits forthcoming) and its opponents. The latter is an especially mixed group, encompassing numerous political functionaries and enter- prise managers who see their positions threatened by the introduction of new demands, and new and unfamiliar performance criteria, as well as rank-and-file workers who see reform as a threat to their relative material and symbolic status, and, perhaps, "New Left" intelligentsia as well, opposed to a pragmatism which seems to aim at a socialist "consumer society".

The consequences of reform, in Hungary at least, are real : whether they are, as yet, irreversible is another question. The fate of economic reform, already far advanced in Hungary, less so in the other Warsaw Pact states, depends not only on the internal balance of political forces as it affects the consensus on reform's social consequences, but also on the position of the USSR. The Soviet attitude has thus far been benign, but indications of official discontent with some consequences of the NEM, at the March 1974 HSWP plenum, may indicate not only domestic, but also Soviet, concerns with the potential results of replacing Utopia with pragmatism.