The Enduring Struggle by John Norris

Author:John Norris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

THE WALL COMES DOWN

The appointment of Ronald Roskens to run the agency coincided with sweeping change on the geopolitical landscape. In June of 1989, the labor union–driven Solidarity party triumphed in Poland’s elections. Just a month earlier, Hungary began to open its borders to the West. Across Eastern Europe, revolutionary fervor against the communist order was in the air.

In a July 1989 visit to the region, where he was greeted by almost rapturous crowds, President Bush called for the United States to support all those striving for free markets, free governments, and reintegration with the West. The “Velvet Revolution” swept Czechoslovakia. In November 1989, East Germany allowed free passage to West Germany as ebullient crowds dismantled the Berlin Wall.

President Bush and Secretary of State Baker seized the opportunity to push for a fundamentally reenvisioned Europe. Baker developed, and Congress soon approved, a huge new assistance program, the Support for East European Democracy, or SEED, Act, which initially focused on Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, but would expand across the region in the months and years that followed.

Baker adopted a radically different approach with the Central European effort. As an official AID history notes, the program would be designed and managed in Washington. “There would be no long studies and no complicated strategies, structures, or processes. Unlike developing countries, whose political elite often had little real interest in economic or political reforms, Central European reformers demanded them, so there was no need to agonize about political will or sequencing or trade-offs; the problem was simply to get the assistance to them as quickly and efficiently as possible.”27 The coordinator for the programs in Eastern Europe reported directly to the secretary of state, but AID and other agencies involved still controlled appropriations for projects. In Eastern Europe, AID deployed smaller, leaner presences than its traditional missions.

The development challenge in Eastern Europe, and subsequently the former Soviet Union, was strikingly different than the ones to which AID was accustomed. The populations across the regions were by and large well-educated, reasonably healthy, and had achieved a socioeconomic status that would normally merit graduating from assistance. Many of these countries were eager to reintegrate with European economic and political institutions. It was easy to see why Baker and others in the halls of the State Department saw the task before them as substantially different from—and easier than—traditional development.

But there were some important caveats. Eastern Europe was terra incognita for AID staff. No one had worked as a junior officer in Poland or Hungary, much less Russia, Armenia, or Bulgaria. There were no templates for rapidly converting economies and political systems from closed, communist systems to free-market democracies. In the most-repressive countries, entire generations of the best and brightest talents had been lost. As AID would later acknowledge, “there was an under-appreciation of the immense complexities of the transition process. Initially AID launched projects of a pilot or demonstration nature, but these were fragmented, disconnected, and insufficient to address the enormity of the need.”28

A whole array of

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