Promoting Democracy and Free Markets in Eastern Europe (Sequoia Seminar)

The year in which the Berlin Wall came down was no ordinary year, and this is no ordinary book.

So rapid and fundamental were the changes in 1989 throughout the communist and once-communist world that the otherwise risky became prudent; exigencies of changing circumstance in made daring what might normally have seemed foolish. In that year, the government of the United States committed itself, in the Support for Eastern European Democracy (SEED) Act, to promote an outcome without historical precedent: the simultaneous establishment of self-sustaining free markets and democracies.

This volume thoroughly explores both the pitfalls and the promise of promoting these conditions in Eastern Europe. More important it contains a wealth of suggestions for ameliorating and even transcending the problems encountered by people seeking to revive democracy and free markets in lands where they were suppressed for so long.

Each contributor to this book is as cognizant of the norms of history as of its exceptions; none expects a short or painless journey for Eastern Europe. This volume makes understandable (even predictable) the difficulties experienced in newly noncommunist countries during the initial post-Soviet years. Because of its clear-eyed recognition of the impediments to success, there may be no more useful prognosis for how U.S. aid can hasten or ease the trek than is provided by this volume.

At date of publication, Charles Wolf, Jr., served as both dean of the RAND Graduate School and director of research in international economics in RAND's National Defense Research Institute. Dr. Wolf is an authority on international economic policy, East-West economic relations, economic development, and relationships between economic and national security issues. He has written numerous books on economics, defense, and international affairs, including Linking Economic Policy and Foreign Policy (Transaction Publishers, 1991) and Markets or Governments (MIT Press, 1988). Dr. Wolf is also a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution.