Prosperity, Democracy, Clean Air : Czechoslovakia: The party is shot; so is socialism in general. It can only be discussed again in the sense of the Social Democrats of Spain or West Germany.

Now that the people of Czechoslovakia have forced the Communist Party to give up its monopoly on power, what does the future hold?

If there were free elections today, the Communist Party would get perhaps 10% of the vote. Even great numbers of party members wouldn’t vote for the party. It is disintegrating as a political force with each passing moment.

But what of socialism generally? As a theory or a model, socialism has collapsed completely. What people care about in this country is prosperity, democracy and clean air. They care about well-stocked markets and good theaters. In short, they are interested in mechanisms that can create these conditions, not grand models of society.

People are totally fed up with all the talk about socialism over the past decades; they feel antipathy toward it because they link it with repression. Socialism in Czechoslovakia can be discussed again in a more sensible way only if a new Social Democratic Party is formed along the lines of the Spanish or German Social Democrats; if the present Communist Party manages to transform itself into a modern party that tries to influence events exclusively by political means; and if a new all-European socialist left is formed that would give new meaning to this ideology. Only under such circumstances could socialists then compete persuasively with liberal and Roman Catholic forces here in the same civil way they do elsewhere in Western Europe.

In making our transition from the past, we have the same aim as the other democratic movements that have recently coursed through Eastern Europe: dismantling Stalinism in the political and economic system and returning to civilization. We all want a restoration of classical attributes, pluralist democracy and, above all, a modern market economy.

A modern market system, however, doesn’t necessarily mean capitalism. Pure capitalism, after all, hasn’t been around for that long, even in the West. Rather, there are different mixes of state and market.

The basic principles of a market economy are the same everywhere. At issue is the final social synthesis of pluralist democracy and the market economy. In a market economy, socialist ideals are expressed in the social, not economic, policies through redistribution of private profits for health care, child care, and so on. We could conceivably end up with a “social synthesis” of the Swedish type, or a “liberal synthesis” of the West German type.

In Czechoslovakia, we are particularly eager to avoid the serious problems of inflation and unemployment that have hit Poland and, to a lesser degree, Hungary. We Czechs are used to full employment and social protection from the disruptions of a dynamic market, so we must avoid mass unemployment and too great a loss of social security. Our distinct advantage, as a belated entrant in the reform era, is that we can learn from the mistakes of others. While we obviously cannot reform without hardship, the experiences elsewhere in the East show that there must also be results very soon.

The brunt of hardship, I believe, should fall on the state enterprises that have been protected for so long: They must now face the economic pressure of competition. Surely, that will drive many of them into bankruptcy, but the consumer will benefit immediately from the broader selection of goods and the more flexible supply of the profitable firms that are able to respond to consumer needs and tastes. Pensioners and young families with children, on the other hand, should be spared the hardship of structural change, which is why we must avoid inflation.

What Czechoslovakia needs is a program to de-bureaucratize the society, introduce market forces, stop ecological destruction and resume the effort to put a human face on Czech socialism.

The Western European countries weren’t ready for what has happened in Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. They imagined that Eastern Europe would stew in its own juices while they formed a common market. For them, “a common European house” was more an exalted figure of speech than something to be taken seriously.

In the past few weeks all that has changed. Europe is emerging with a unified cultural tradition and political perspective. Adding 100 million new people to a nearly integrated market of 350 million can make Europe a formidable competitor in the world economy to North America and the Pacific Basin. With East and West united again, the once unimaginable revival of European civilization will be at hand.