Bob Deacon (ed.): The New Eastern Europe: Social Policy Past, Present and Future. London: Sage Publications, 1991, 198 pp.

Employing a broad concept of social policy, which covers employment, education, housing, workplace democracy, natural and human environment, minority rights, gender relations, health care and social security, this book uses different types of social policy regimes derived from OECD countries to categorize emergent Eastern European social policies. One may question the validity of these categories in the Eastern European context, but there was a kind of welfare state in the former Communist regimes.

Three regime categories - liberal welfare states, corporatist welfare states and social democratic welfare states - are employed as tools for comparative inquiry. The authors characterize all of the former Communist systems as bureaucratic collectivism, and then go on to state that the liberal welfare state model is the most likely model for Slovenia and Hungary. By comparison, a social democratic welfare state model is recommended in the long run for the (former) Czecho-Slovakia. However, we wish to point out that the ruling party in Hungary - the Democratic Forum - has established corporatist networks and that Vaclav Klaus, who follows a laissez-faire-oriented economic policy, rules the Czech provinces at present. We would also warn that in the long run the bureaucratic collectivist state could degenerate into authoritarian populism in Romania, the republics of the former Soviet Union, in parts of former Jugoslavia, Bulgaria and perhaps Poland.

The authors underline the need for adapting social policy measures to the
problems of market liberalization without hampering economic growth. And they
underline the need for social policy measures to be domestically acceptable, if the

dual processes of democratization and market transformation are to be sustained in the short run, and remain viable in the long run. They emphasize the domestic aspect because too many external constraints from foreign countries as well as from international and supranational organizations like the IMF, the World Bank and the European Community, could jeopardize popular patience and system legitimacy.

Among the most critical problems that hamper social policy in Eastern Europe, according to the authors, are the following: First, the politicians have only fashioned temporary and ad hoc laws concerning social policy. And the competence to implement these measures rests with underfunded local governments. Second, the state has not managed to decide on fundamental tax laws and revenue systems. And it has not funded and trained a professional administration to handle social policy. Third, these countries have not decided on appropriate corporation laws, partly because there is uncertainty about which ownership forms are to be encouraged. the state still owns the bulk of heavy industry which drains resources away from social policy by subsidizing employment.

Deacon et al. evaluate the different countries' policies on ten criteria. These criteria serve to differentiate the countries along two dimensions: (1) efficient provision versus equal affluence, and (2) citizen autonomy in articulating needs and providing for themselves versus universal state guarantees. In the authors' view, each country makes a trade-off between these values.

The authors then use these ten criteria, in addition to their explicitly chosen values, to evaluate how each country is managing social policy so far and what the prospects are likely to be. They favour policies that further equality and autonomy, but they realize that there is a tension here, because there is individual variation in utilizing the autonomy. Despite their care in balancing competing values, we think they jump too easily to the conclusion that a social democratic social policy regime would attenuate this tension.

In the authors' evaluation, Czecho-Slovakia ranks high, because of the social democratic legacy between the two World Wars and a strong contemporary social democratic counter-current to the prevailing laissez-faire government. We contest this conclusion, since it illustrates the haphazard, tentative and uncertain character of such predictions, which the authors themselves warn about from the outset. In addition to the fact that Czecho-Slovakia is breaking up, the areas where social democratic hopes might be entertained - the Czech provinces - are those where the social democratic protagonists are too weak in the short run. Hungary and Slovenia are placed in the second rank because of their earlier start in reforming social policy and their more matured economies. However, a developing dualistic society where one half is well adapted to market reforms and the other is not could, according to the authors, lead to instability.

The third rank, which has travelled the shortest distance to a developed welfare state regime and has the bleakest prospects, includes Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, most of the republics in the former Jugoslavia and the former Soviet Union. Some might find it surprising that Poland is placed in this rank, because it started the process as early as Hungary. But the authors contend that the Polish polity is a captive of high working-class mobilization attributable to the Solidarity tradition, a heavy burden of debt, strong Catholic Church interference in politics and the weak tradition of democracy, which may cause resistance to secular social policy and transitory austerity measures.

The authors discuss the prospects for an alternative socialist welfare state to the
regimes operating within the dominant existing and emerging capitalist economic
systems, concluding that socialists should abandon this Utopian alternative and

rather strive for reforms within the system. What actually takes place in these countries is a cut-back process in which the benefits (e.g. unemployment benefits, free health care, etc.) in the Communist systems are brought down step-by-step, as their economies crumble.

One criticism of this book is that Romania and the former Jugoslavia are dealt with in comparisons and generalizations, but are not given a separate chapter. It seems that the authors make sweeping generalizations in the present uncertain situation, without sufficiently distinguishing between different countries and regions within them. However, it is an interesting and illuminating book, which balances the concentration on economic challenges and political institution-building that is found in the existing literature.