A History of Nation Building – Part 2

I now turn to the other side of the coin, the efforts of the Soviet Union to create a power bloc in Eastern Europe, with a small aside into the Soviet Union itself.

The Iron Curtain – Post-World War II Failures

Although it seems outrageous on general principle, it remains that what the Soviet Union did with the Warsaw Pact after World War II meets the definition of nation building. That they failed does not change what they did, it simply provides examples to learn from.

As with the successes, the first and most important factor is that the nations affected did not want to be Stalinist dictatorships with command economies. As with democratic republics and industrial economies this seems self-evident, but it remains that some people really do prefer such nonsense. Stalin obviously thought it was a good idea, and he had legitimate enthusiastic supporters among the “workers and peasants” who bought the hype. Very few of them lived in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. As a result the occupations required significantly more effort to impose. The Soviet troops stationed in various countries were there not merely to “protect” them from Western “aggression,” but also to provide backup to the Communist governments. Of course, this was not always successful.

In 1956 the people of Hungary tried to rebel against their government. No help came from the West and they were crushed. In 1967 the people of Czechoslovakia tried reforming their government and were put down.

While American troops have been in Germany and Japan even longer, no such uprising has ever occurred. No attempts at government reform on the lines desired by the Hungarians and Czechs have ever been tried.

The eventual fall of the Berlin Wall signified a

failure of Soviet nation building.

When the Soviet Union finally began collapsing other popular uprisings, mostly peaceful, raced through the Warsaw Pact countries, overthrowing the Communist governments, and installing Western-style multi-party Parliamentary systems. Even with the “decline” of the United States, no such movement has occurred in Germany or Japan. Europe has continued its evolution towards the European Union, and is undergoing political upheaval on other accounts, but not because it is rejecting the liberation from Nazi Germany effected by the United States and its allies.

Of course there is also the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, as its constituent states have mostly rejected the government and economy imposed on them. (Belarus seems determined to remain a Stalinist state, and Transnistria has partially broken away from Moldova so it do likewise.)

The differences in the new governments and economies their people have effected shows that such rejection does not always have to be in favor of Western style government and industrial economies.

This shows us that not all nation building is going to succeed, even with 50-70 year occupations.

The next part will consider some older examples that are not commonly thought of as nation building but do in fact have many similarities.