Ban: The Wake of Communism
Cornel Ban, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said that the standard of living in countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union has diverged wildly in the decades following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Ban make the argument in a March 13 interview with BU Today entitled “Defeating Communism Didn’t Necessarily Defeat Its Deprivations.”
In the interview, Ban said:
“[The former Eastern Bloc] was never a “bloc” per se. Hungarian socialism was extremely different from its Romanian counterpart. This is even more so today, when what you see in the region is a dizzying mosaic of market-society arrangements, ranging from Slovenia’s social democratic model to Georgia’s libertarian one. In a way, while Slovenia has been, at least until recently, on its way to becoming a hybrid of Sweden and Austria, Georgia put into practice some of the most ambitious aspirations of the Tea Party. The closer you are to Slovenia’s attempt to reconcile market dislocations and socioeconomic rights, the better off you are economically, on average.”
You can read the entire interview here.
Cornel Ban is co-director of the Global Economic Governance Initiative, an affiliated center of the Pardee School. Learn more about him here.