After the Wall, Harvard's Experts Lend a Hand

As Eastern Europe rushes headlong into capitalism, professors and administrators at the Kennedy School of Government are trying to make sure the political backlash from economic reforms does not damage new democratic institutions.

In May 1990, Professor of Electoral Politics Shirley Williams and others at the Kennedy School founded Project Liberty--an international consortium to help the fledgling democracies to adapt to capitalism and to reorganize political and educational institutions.

The project grew out of concerns that the West was shirking its responsibility to provide Eastern European nations with political guidance while innundating them with economic advice.

"I felt very strongly that the whole of the political transition was being seriously neglected," said Williams.

Co-sponsored by the University of Toronto, Project Liberty will consist of a series of workshops which will bring together public policy experts from the United States, Canada and Western Europe. These scholars and politicians will focus on Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, although program directors say they may consider Romania and Bulagaria at a later date.

Directors say they ultimately hope that programs sush as this will not only help build closer ties between officials in the participating countries, but also serve as a stepping-stone for East European membership in the European Community.

At the first workshopm held this April in Gdansk, Poland, participants studied the political consequences of the privatization and dismantling of command economies.

Many Eastern European leaders said they feared that support for privatization was waning as citizens were starting to bear the burden of reform, according to Robert P. Beschel, a consultant for Project Liberty who attended the workshop.

"One of the major aspects we talked about is how you can facilitate privatization in order to minimize the backlash," Beschel said.

The Organization for European Cooperation and Development (OECD) will also co-sponsor a number of workshops, including one to be held in Paris later this summer on the relationship between central and local government.

Educational Reform

Another goal of the program is to stimulate public policy research in Eastern Europe, Williams said. Professors involved in Project Liberty plan to write case studies about the transition to democracy. They also hope to introduce western techniques of teaching public policy to educational systems stifled by decades of tight communist control, Williams said.

By bringing together both Western European and North American advisers, Project Liberty can offer Eastern European leaders an array of democratic and educational institutions, the directors said.

"I don't think we have the right to stuff models down their throats," Williams said.