CHANGES IN THE WORLD ECONOMY 79 emergence of patterns of development alternative to classical strategies of catching-up. Finally, we should also mention the issue of social policy and domestic distribution. Progressive and left debates in this field are partly blocked by the ideological legacy of state socialism, a system in which these issues, it is said, had been handled without reference to "economic efficiency" and had been a crucial and highly "ideological" matter for the regimes. What is needed here, once again, is not only the emancipation of left debates from the ideological burden of being identified as "old wine in new bottles". It is also necessary to oppose the view that the dynamics of the world economy are something "natural", "impersonal", "apolitical", impossible to influence and to change and that it is therefore, that there is Nobjectivelyi no chance for promoting popular demands in the field of social policy. Last but not least, there is the question of democracy, which should be closely connected with the social policy and domestic distribution issue, but is actually not part of the debate about alternative patterns of development in Central Eastern Europe. In the former state socialist countries the obstacles to any left reassessment of classical liberal, purely representative, democracy are perhaps even more severe than in many countries of the Third World. In the latter, the turn to representative democracy in the 1980s, in the eyes of the population and policy-makers, was less closely bound to unsatisfactory economic performance under previous dictatorships than was the case with the state socialist regimes. The old claims for "societal self-government" put forward by the former left opposition to state socialism, definitely lost their vigour soon after the formal "systemic change" in 1989. During the past five years, they have failed to analyse the performance of the new system in a practical and comprehensive manner, from the point of view of the continuing divorce of the formally representative political system from popular needs and the continuing demobilisation of the population. Instead, "self-organisation" and "self-government" have been seen , by and large, as something far removed from the state and from politics, as something advanced only by small grassroots groups. Thus it has been reduced, in practical terms, to a sterile phrase. Efforts to re-establish the significance of popular needs as an inherent and legitime element of politics, performed wherever, through whomever and under whatever economic circumstances, are widely missing. Similarly, whenever there was felt to be the slightest move into this direction within the political arena, it was denounced as seditious populism and endangering political stability by virtually all acknowledged political forces. It is precisely the latter fact that should make the radical left keen to act in this field. To conclude: As the disastrous consequences of "neoliberal" peripheralisation are felt more and more, there are signs that the