Cracks in the East Bloc

Hungary has opened the floodgates and the flood has followed. “Suspending” its 20-year-old agreement with other Warsaw Pact countries, the Budapest regime has told thousands of East Germans who came to Hungary as tourists and stayed as political refugees that they are free to make their way to West Germany, where instant citizenship awaits them.

Thousands of East Germans who have been camped in western Hungary near the Austrian border hoping for just such an opportunity have already left. Thousands of others have entered Hungary from Czechoslovakia, apparently intending to continue West. Foreign Minister Gyula Horn says that suspension of the agreement to prevent the flight of Warsaw Pact country citizens is only temporary, but in the same breath he says the border will stay open as long as necessary. What may be about to occur, then, is the greatest mass defection from eastern Europe since the Berlin Wall went up 28 years ago.

West Germany has hailed the Hungarian decision as a notable humanitarian act. It is surely that, but it doesn’t detract from that act’s decency to note that it was not altogether selfless. Hungarians have been openly worried that their country was in danger of becoming one big refugee camp, the unwilling host to a growing number of East German visitors who refuse to return home. Since May, when Hungary began literally to dismantle the iron curtain that sealed its border with Austria, about 6,000 East Germans have illegally made their way to the West. Most are from that younger and well-educated segment of the labor force whose skills and vigor are vital to the success of any national economy.

East Germany has reacted with predictable wrath to Hungary’s open-border policy. It may yet go beyond angry rhetoric, perhaps by imposing punitive economic measures, perhaps--though it could risk a popular explosion at home if it does so--by cutting off its citizens’ travel rights. But whatever Hungary may risk by offending East Germany will probably be more than offset by what it will gain from a grateful West Germany. Budapest and Bonn both deny that any economic deal was struck to permit the East German exodus. It would be surprising indeed, though, if West Germany didn’t respond with greater generosity as Hungary moves to reshape its economy and transform its political system.

It would be surprising, too, if Budapest acted without at least an encouraging wink and nod from Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The Soviet leader has no reason at this point to feel solicitous about East Germany. Hard-liners in that regime, led by the sick and apparently dying Erich Honecker, have always been uncomfortable about Gorbachev’s efforts to allow some measure of greater popular choice into the Soviet political system and permit some diminution of state control in cultural and social affairs. Stalinism may be discredited in the Soviet Union, but in East Germany as well as Romania and Czechoslovakia, it continues to serve as the model for political control.

Hungary some time ago made the decision to move toward political pluralism and a market based-economy. Multiparty elections are not far off; the Communist Party that has ruled the country since it was installed in power by the Red Army in the 1940s says it will accept the results of free balloting, even if that means the end of its power. By facilitating the flight of East Germans, Hungary has sent the most dramatic signal yet that it wants its future to be with the West, and provided vivid proof of how the once rock-solid political unity of the East Bloc is steadily and inexorably cracking and crumbling.