Lessons from around the bloc.

On November 6, George W. Bush gave a speech described by some as "visionary" and "bold." One of his themes was the democratization of the Middle East, which, according to the neo-con theory that prevails in his administration, is to start in newly liberated Iraq and then spread, domino-like, to other oppressive Arab states. "In many nations of the Middle East," he said, "democracy has not yet taken root. And the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it."

Assuming that's how he really feels, how successful will this venture be? If you haven't spent the last several years hanging around departments of political "science," playing with vectors, lemmas and Markov models, you probably believe that culture and history will have some say in the outcome. The problem is, there are few people in U.S. government and media circles who possess the necessary expertise, linguistic and otherwise, to make sense of that part of the world. Thus it might help to look at the experience of Eastern and Central Europe, the last part of the world to emerge from authoritarianism within living memory. More than a decade after the collapse of communism there, a clear principle is discernable: The success of the process of democratization is in inverse proportion to the extent of repression under the previous regime. In short: The worse off you were, the worse off you'll be.

Americans were accustomed to viewing the European communist countries as a "bloc"?monolithic, predictable, homogeneous and pretty much interchangeable, at least from a political point of view. In fact, the differences between these countries were enormous. Had these differences not existed, large numbers of people in Romania wouldn't have fled to Hungary in the 80s in search of a richer, freer life. Russians and East Germans would have been as free to travel and mix with foreigners as Yugoslavs and Poles. The fact that they weren't points to major variations in governance.

Consider the list of countries expected to join the European Union next year. It includes Poland, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak Republics. It doesn't include Romania, Albania or any ex-Soviet territories except the Baltic States. The countries that lag behind are the very ones in which repression was harshest.

In Poland and Hungary, the era of harsh Stalinism gave way to much more liberal societies following the revolts in Budapest of 1956. While workers' uprisings and economic crises were a recurring feature of Polish life, the country enjoyed a greater degree of intellectual and religious freedom than anywhere else in the bloc. Poland's remarkable post-Stalin achievements in fields as diverse as cinema, modernist music, avant-garde theater and poster art would not have been possible under a stricter, more dogmatic regime. In Hungary, the pragmatic communist leader Janos Kadar pacified the people with a mixture of limited private enterprise, relatively open borders, and relaxed censorship known as "goulash communism." Hungarians said that their country was "the jolliest barracks in the socialist camp."

The post-1968 regime in Czechoslovakia is often described as very repressive. However, the repression there was more bureaucratic than violent. The early years of communism in that country (1948-54) saw hundreds of executions, but during the period of "normalization" following the Soviet invasion, the principal method of repression was enforced downward mobility. Professors, diplomats and lawyers who displeased the authorities typically found themselves delivering milk or cleaning windows for a living. This is the world depicted in such novels as Bruce Chatwin's Utz and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. While Saddam Hussein was torturing and murdering his political opponents, cutting off ears and tongues, Vaclav Havel was working in a brewery between spells in the slammer.

By contrast, Romania and Albania were ruled for decades by grotesque megalomaniacs who nurtured Saddam-like personality cults. Western observers sometimes described Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu as a "maverick" due to his token Moscow-tweaking gestures (refusing to help invade Czechoslovakia in 1968; sending athletes to the Los Angeles Olympics in violation of the Soviet boycott). In fact, his primary activities were building palaces for himself, persecuting the country's Hungarian population, destroying villages and crushing dissent. (Substitute Kurds for Hungarians, and the parallels to Saddam's regime are obvious.) Romania suffered, and continues to suffer today?it is one of Europe's poorest countries, and corruption is epidemic. As for Albania, where Enver Hoxha ran a paranoid police state, it is probably the only country in Europe that deserves the appellation "third world."

The same principle applied in the former Soviet Union after the death of Stalin. At one end of the country, Estonians were watching Finnish television and supporting a sophisticated cultural life. Their Finno-Ugric language, understood by hardly anyone outside the national circle, gave them both a window on the West and a tool for national self-preservation. So it's not a surprise to hear that the tech-savvy little Baltic country (which has more internet connections than Italy, Ireland and Spain) is in line to join the EU. On the other hand, several thousand miles away, the Central Asian "Stans" were run virtually as private fiefdoms by brutal and corrupt party bosses. Therefore, it's hardly news that the dictator of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, has renamed the month of January after himself, while his counterpart in Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, has (according to the British ambassador there) had two of his opponents boiled alive.

In 1987, a time when few outside the Middle East knew or cared about Saddam Hussein and his savage regime, I picked up Charles Humana's "World Human Rights Guide" for the previous year. Formerly of Amnesty International, Humana rates individual countries' human-rights records on a scale of 100. Iraq scored a wretched 19, making it the second-worst human-rights violator in the world (only Ethiopia scored lower). Considering that this situation persisted for decades, the outlook for the Iraqi democracy project is grim. The same can be said for its fellow Axis of Evil member North Korea, one of the most repressive and isolated countries in the world.

Although I think determinism doesn't belong in the messy world of politics, there's a clear pattern here. If undemocratic countries don't allow at least some room to think and breathe, their future democratic prospects will remain dismal. A pinched and restricted life is the norm under dictatorship, but there's a world of difference between losing your job and losing your head. In Iraq and similar countries, all those lost heads add up to dim prospects for the future.