Essay On Why Did Central And Eastern Europe Collapse

Question 1:

Why did the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe collapse?

In his paper Mark R. Beissinger argues that nationalism might be the main cause of the collapse, however, a question arises: why did the other Communist countries, such as China, North Korea and others remained under the Communist rule? Bessinger argues that “The chief reason why Asian and Latin American Communist regimes survived is that they never initiated the kind of political liberalization undertaken inside the Soviet Union, unleashing political forces that eventually overwhelmed the state” (2009, p.3). Another reason for the different result is that the Asian and Latin American regimes managed to include nationalism as the core component of the leading Communist parties” (p.4.). The reasons behind the collapse of the Soviet rule in Europe are all connected, however, this paper proposes that the initial reason was the failure for the Communist ideology to work, which caused nationalism to rise. The ideology of Communism, never took the perfect form of what was promised to the population. This, in turn, led to the following decline in economy and structural problems of the Communist system, emergence of civil society, nationalism and dissatisfaction of

The paper will also argue that the policies imposed by Mikhail Gorbachev finalized the destruction of the SU and led to its collapse (Coldwar.org, 2015). These reasons will be reflected using a comparative analysis of the fall of Communism in three different countries: Czechoslovakia, Poland and the German Democratic republic. These countries were chosen as there were different aspects contributing to the fall in each of them as well as they greatly differ with regards to how convulsed the fall of Communism occurred in each