东欧前共产主义世界中只有10%的人口得到了他们在拆墙时承诺的东西。

 

第二世界的情况如何？

最近，在与一位年迈的越南共产党员喝茶时，这个问题被提及。

他对自己国家的社会主义制度存在的问题非常坦诚，但他说，越南政府，就像中国和社会主义世界其他剩下的国家一样，非常仔细地观察了1989年后苏联及其卫星国的情况，并急于避免重复这些经历。

What about the Second World? Over tea with an aging member of the Vietnamese Communist Party recently, this question came up.

 He is very open about problems with the socialist system in his country, but said that the government in Vietnam, much like in China and the rest of what’s left of the socialist world, watched very carefully what happened to the Soviet Union and its satellites after 1989, and are desperate to avoid repeating those experiences.

 

当然，管理苏联和华沙条约国的共产党领导人输了，而且输得很惨。

但是，他们的公民，共产主义世界中普通的、受苦的人民呢？

全球资本主义的胜利对他们也意味着胜利吗？

他们得到了繁荣和民主的回报吗？

Certainly, the leaders of the Communist Parties who ran the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries lost, and lost big.

 But what about their citizens, the regular, suffering peoples of the communist world? Did the triumph of global capitalism mean victory for them too? Were they rewarded with prosperity and democracy?

 

经济学家布兰科-米拉诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）是世界上最重要的全球不平等问题专家之一，他出生和成长在共产主义的南斯拉夫，在柏林墙倒塌25周年之际提出了这些问题。

我们大概可以猜到，不，他们并没有全部得到这个答案。

但这肯定是1991年的想法，而且在许多方面，这是对共产主义世界中受苦受难的人民作出的承诺，包括对米拉诺维奇本人。4

米拉诺维奇在一篇题为 "墙为谁而倒 "的短文中，对2014年的后共产主义国家进行了考察。

一些国家的经济规模仍然比1990年时小。

有些国家的增长速度比他们的西欧邻国慢，这意味着他们甚至比1990年的低点越来越落后，当时他们的制度崩溃削减了他们的经济规模。

他发现只有五个真正的资本主义成功案例。

阿尔巴尼亚、波兰、白俄罗斯、亚美尼亚和爱沙尼亚，它们一直在以某种方式追赶第一世界。

只有三个是民主国家。

Economist Branko Milanovic, one of the world’s foremost experts on global inequality, born and raised in communist Yugoslavia, asked those questions on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.

 We can probably guess that no, they didn’t all get that.

 But it was certainly the idea back in 1991, and in many ways it was the promise that was made to the suffering peoples of the communist world, including to Milanovic himself.

 What happened instead was a devastating Great Depression.4 Milanovic, in a short essay titled “For Whom the Wall Fell?,” looked at postcommunist countries in 2014.

 Some countries still have smaller economies than they did in 1990.

 Some have grown slower than their Western European neighbors, meaning they are falling further and further behind even from the low point in 1990, when the collapse of their system cut down the size of their economies.

 He finds only five real capitalist success cases: Albania, Poland, Belarus, Armenia, and Estonia, which have been somehow catching up with the First World.

 Only three are democracies.

 

据米拉诺维奇计算，这意味着东欧前共产主义世界中只有10%的人口得到了他们在拆墙时承诺的东西。

第二世界输了，而且输得很惨。

他们失去了冷战时期的地缘政治力量，他们的公民往往失去了物质财富，许多人甚至没有获得民主自由来平衡这一损失。

Which means, Milanovic calculates, that only 10 percent of the population of the former communist world in Eastern Europe got what they were promised when they tore the wall down.

 The Second World lost, and lost big.

 They lost the geopolitical power they had during the Cold War, their citizens often lost material wealth, and many did not even gain democratic freedoms to counterbalance that loss.5