The democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) at the very end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s resulted in essential social changes. After the fall of Communism, certainty has disappeared from the everyday life of ordinary people.
With the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, transformation has started. The countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria changed their political vector from the East to the West. Political and economic changes were done fast – to a greater or less successful degree.
This year it was Tuesday. A terrible heat wave had been affecting Warsaw for over a week. Temperatures were above 30 degrees and everybody was looking for some shade. Those who could, spent their afternoons in parks, and many people voluntarily stayed overtime in offices to enjoy the AC.
Defenders of Poland’s success story may sometimes hear that they focus too much on economic advances, prosperity, and GPD growth instead of thinking about the actual lives of “average people” and the “social costs” of Poland’s transformation.
During the transition towards liberal democracy and a market economy, some countries from the former Eastern Bloc managed to successfully mimic the model that had already been proven to be successful in the West – a multiparty democratic system, combined with mostly free market capitalism.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a distinct need for the achievements of liberalism. The parties that embraced the rights, freedoms, and the values of a market economy enjoyed more significant voter support, while the non-liberal parties viewed some liberalized basic values as self-evident.
These years are already forgotten: hardly any political activist or commentator of current economic and political affairs takes into account the enormous advance of the 2004-2007 members of the EU in terms of prosperity, way of life, and political and economic liberties.
Time and again, those who should defend “our” ideas vehemently beat their breast and start apologizing, claiming that they were stupid in their attempts to redefine liberalism. They sometimes even go as far as to state that liberalism is a thing of the past.
Creation of functioning local government in 1990 after a long period of centralized governance during the communist regime is considered to be a major achievement of the democratic transformation which took place after 1989.
Energy transformation, Germany’s plan to transform the energy industry into a greenhouse gas-neutral energy supply, is no longer solely a federal government project. Local authorities are beginning to push ahead with energy transition focused on decentralized municipal energy concepts.
