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7 1 Why did the Soviet empire and Yugoslavia collapse? What forces within and without shaped these momentous events? And what happened afterward? Which peoples became more free? More prosperous? Better able to fulfill their ambitions and potential? Which achieved higher levels of human development and individual dignity—and which did not? Our focus is on the USSR and its successor states, all members of the former Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia and its successor states, Albania, and Mongolia. To gain perspective, we include data and analysis of other former and present communist countries—Cambodia, China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. Reviewing these many cases, we see a pattern: societal fitness—the ability to cope with complex challenges and opportunities—seemed to align with culture. Societies with a heritage of Western Christianity proved far better able to engage complexity than those with an Orthodox Christian, Muslim, or other tradition. Starting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, peoples in East Central Europe were energized by revolutionary demands for mass literacy, free thought, and respect for individual human dignity. Their past became both present and future. Following the collapse of communist regimes across Eurasia in 1989–1991, some successor states avoided or minimized ethnic conflict while others suffered ethnic fighting at home or across borders. Still others managed to prevent or repress both internal and external conflict. Two leading authorities argue that democratization is the key variable that accounts for these divergent outcomes (Snyder 2000; Mansfield and Snyder 2005). The present book, however, argues chapter five Complexity Science as a Tool to Understand the New Eurasia 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 7 2 C O M P L E X I T Y S C I E N C E A N D W OR L D A F FA I R S that achievements and difficulties on the path from communist rule to a new way of life are more fully explained by each society’s relative fitness. A fit society can deal constructively with ethnic as well as with other political, economic, and cultural problems. If a society fails on any of these fronts, internal grievances are likely to become more acute and may even explode in violence. When this happens, the society’s ability to cope with many other problems also declines. Thus, societal fitness is both cause and effect of overall development. The key to fitness, according to complexity science, is self-organization. This quality, in turn, depends heavily upon culture. Cultures long devoted to universal literacy, independent thinking, and individual dignity have a far greater capacity for self-organization than those that resisted free thought and human rights. Trends in Human Development: Variations That Need Explanation The huge area to which we shall try to apply insights from complexity science extends from Albania to Vietnam. To identify trends across Eurasia, we begin by tracing the rise and fall of each country’s score on the UN Human Development Index (HDI). Later we will follow the patterns in each country’s political and economic evolution. To set the stage, Figure 5.1 shows changes in HDI scores for all these countries at five junctures: 1970—the onset of Brezhnev-era stagnation in the Soviet empire; 1990—as communist systems in Europe collapsed; 1995—the economic nadir for most Soviet and Yugoslav states; 2000—when many began to recover or even move ahead; and 2010—when some prospered and others backpedaled. China, of course, was on a different trajectory. Mao Zedong in 1970 still presided over a chaotic Cultural Revolution. By 1990 Deng Xiaoping had unleashed the slogan “glorious to be rich.” By 2010 the resultant system of Leninist capitalism helped China become the world’s second-largest economy. Vietnam, though hostile to China, also embraced Leninist capitalism. Each of the states that took shape in Eurasia in the 1990s and early twentieth century had its own unique qualities, assets, and problems. Still, we can identify six groups of countries distinguished by the way they dealt with ethnic issues and development in the first decades after the collapse of communist rule. Several zones were dominated by countries with the same cultural heritage—buttressing this book’s contention that cultural patterns go far toward shaping societal fitness. Zone A: Peace, Progress, and Democracy Zone A consisted of societies and states that, in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, experienced almost no ethnic violence and made strong progress [3.144.17.45] Project...

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