- Email: [email protected]
The future of Eastern Europe
150
THE FUTURE OF EASTERN EUROPE Lessons
from
the Third
World
Ziauddin Sardar and Merry1 Wyn Davies
Eastern European states are in a similar position to Third World countries just after their independence. There are three main parallels: both groups have to live with colonial legacies, both have gained independence within an economic order that discriminates against the non-industrialized countries, and both are marginaliz~ from the centres of political, economic and technological power. There is also one major difference: Eastern Europe can lay legitimate claims to be part of the dominant European civilization. On these assumptions, there are two pessimistic scenarios for the future of the ex-socialist European countries, with the following conclusion: given the strong parallels, Eastern Europe is set, no~ithstanding mem~~hip of the EC, to follow the classical patterns of Third World underdevelopment. As such, Eastern European countries should join hands with the Third World states to set an agenda for genuine structural changes in the global economic system.
A new world has been made by the disintegration of the Communist bloc. The patterns of the past 40 years no longer apply. This is a common argument. However, change is often a fickle illusion that masks tenacious continuities. The citizens of Eastern Europe may soon join the ranks of those who have had to learn that their brave new world is a perilous place. Today, Eastern European states are in a similar position to numerous Third World countries during their independence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although they have a slightly more developed, if somewhat obsolete and redundant, technological infrastructure, their position in the global economic order is not much different from many large developing countries such as India, Brazil and Egypt. The parallels between these developing countries and the newly liberated Eastern European states is the only appropriate analogy for understanding the challenges that face the emerging Ziauddin Sardar is a member of the Futures Advisory Board. Merry1 Wyn Davies is the author of Knowing One Another: Shaping an Islamic Anthropology (Mansell, London, 1988). They can be contacted via the publishers.
0016-3287/020150-08 @I 1992 Butterworth-Heinemann
Ltd
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March 1992
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151
nations of the East. There are significant differences, no doubt. Yet the similarities are the surest key to the questions that need to be debated. For this reason it is most likely that the matter will be brushed aside. It is far too embarrassing-politically as well as academically-for all concerned. Already, just two years after the European revolution, the euphoria of liberation is being replaced in Eastern Europe by a pessimism that is engendered by realization of insurmountable odds-a pessimism that Third World countries know so well. Liberation, or independence, as the states of Eastern Europe are learning to their cost, is not a cure-all; it is simply the assumption of a new set of problems and constraints. Soon, they will come to realize-as Third World countries have already realized-that reform is as much required by Western capitalism as it was by Stalinist communism. And, like so many thinkers in developing countries have known for so long, they may even come to terms with the knowledge that the language to discuss humane solutions is elusive in the realpolitik of both systems. There are three strong parallels, and one major difference, between the emergence of Third World countries during the past 40 years and the present situation of Eastern European states. Both groups are a product of a colonial history which, though different in its ideological make-up, is singularly homogeneous in its legacy-dependency. Both groups gained their ‘independence’ within a world order with well established rules of economic and commercial behaviour. Both groups are totally marginalized from the centres of political, economic, technological and cultural power. And the difference: unlike the Third World states, Eastern European countries can legitimately claim to be part of the dominant global civilization -they are essentially Western by possession of common roots in Western civilization and culture. Whether this will mark a point of departure between the development in the Third World over the past five decades and the possible future of Eastern Europe is a debatable point. Certainly, the ‘common ground’ between the Third World and Eastern Europe will be the major decisive factor shaping the future of ex-Soviet satellites. The new old world order Eastern Europe has the same periphery-to-centre relationship with the existing economic powers as the Third World. The Third World countries gained their independence in an international economic order that is also the chief inheritance of the newly liberated Eastern European states. The framework of this economic order was set up at the end of World War II by the Bretton Woods conference, held at the town of that name in the USA. It set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. At the Bretton Woods conference, the Western nations, having lost their empires, made institutional arrangement for continuing their domination and exploitation of the newly emerging nations. The Third World itself was not a party to the negotiations nor has it benefited from the results. Instead, it has discovered, to its cost and dismay, that the system was designed to discriminate against it and to ensure its dependence on the established power blocs in the industrialized countries. To this day, even though there have been some minor changes, the voting power in key institutions like the IMF reflects the world of the 1940s and 1950s. The Eastern European states are set to suffer
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lessons from the Third World
the same injustice from the existing world economic order as the Third World.’ The Third World nations have realized that all new worlds are founded on continuity. It is the continuity of the old international economic order that is shaping the ‘newness’ of a world transformed by the collapse of communism. As the Third World has found to its cost, you can swap one master for another and still remain slaves. What this means for Eastern Europe is that communism has been replaced by a new form of economic slavery: that of IMF, World Bank and multinational corporations’ monopoly capital. The iron curtain will soon be replaced by a poverty curtain, at least for the more southern of the former Soviet satellites. Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia may eventually be allowed to enter the EC (although, as we argue below, this could in itself be a new form of colonialism), but others-Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia-are most likely to be in the same position as Turkey, and the doors of the EC are unlikely to open for them. Thus, Eastern Europe is set to follow the old patterns of underdevelopment in the new order of the post-communist world.* More specifically, the future course of ‘development’ in Eastern Europe will have the following Third-World-type characteristics. (1) The IMF and World Bank will enforce the classical, top-down, capitalist model of development on Eastern European states. This will induce the newly liberated states into becoming satellites of industrialized nations. The material gains of this development will come through loss of autonomy, politically and morally, and expropriation of local control of resources, and will accrue to a tiny portion of the population which will become the new elite. As the Third World knows, material gains from IMF- and World Bank-backed development strategies take a long time to trickle down to the mass of the population, if at all. A tiny group of ‘haves’ will thus dominate a vast majority of ‘have-nots’; and a new breed of elite will run Eastern European states while the mass of the people will find themselves with few opportunities for betterment. (2) Eastern European nations are being given preferential treatment in the rescheduling of their debt burden to Western banks. But they, like the Third World, are trapped in the debt syndrome. They will find their room for manoeuvre and choice curtailed by the agenda of what is good and necessary set by remote and faceless money men. As aid flows to Eastern Europe, within a decade from now, its constituent states will find themselves in a similar debt trap to that of so many Third World countries: what this will mean in practical terms is that real resources will flow from Eastern Europe to the West, inducing deeper and deeper dependency with all the attendant consequences such as poverty, unemployment and social degradation. (3) The only economic countries, is cheap and end up supplying West all the fragility that this 22’3 that so many Third
edge of Eastern Europe, like so many developing abundant labour. Eastern European states will thus Europe with an ‘internal pool’ of cheap labour with gives to economic development. This is the ‘Catch World nations have suffered. The problem is not
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getting foreign investment to come into the country, but getting it to stay so that it can generate locally sustainable growth and to direct this investment in an appropriate and desirable direction. Multinational companies are not interested in investing in a technology that is useful or desirable for a developing nation; their concern is to find the cheapest labour for the manufacture of the individual components of their consumer goods which are actually put together at a totally different location. With such a new pool of labour clamouring for jobs there is no reason why multinational corporations should not have bonanza while the economies of Eastern Europe show little benefit from the hyperactivity. (4) Just as in the Third World, communism in Eastern Europe placed industrialization as a first priority in essentially agricultural and rural nations. The basic health of their economies has been deformed as has that of Third World nations by the neglect of agriculture and the failure to make a balance between urban needs for cheap food and adequate remuneration of rural labour. Adjusting that balance has proved an irreconcilable problem for Third World nations. Once the imbalance occurs it is virtually impossible to adjust it without provoking social unrest either in the city or the countryside. IMF- and World Bank-induced strategies will further enhance this imbalance in Eastern Europe, generating increasing social strife and unrest. The old new nationalism At independence, many Third World countries discovered that the departing, or not-so-departing, colonial powers had created purely artificial nationstates. Thus, for example, Pakistan was divided into ‘West’ and ‘East’ with a thousand miles of Indian territory between them; the Kurds were scattered between Iran, Iraq and Turkey; and the Sudan was put together from a ‘Muslim north’ and a ‘Christian south’. The Third World nation-states were designed to be unstable, to fall apart and to provide continuous and constant tensions to enable the newly independent states to be locked into a particular socioeconomic framework .4 Eastern European states also find themselves to be purely artificial entities: nationalism in itself is an insufficient rationale for creating a homogeneous state and is always subject to constant subdivision, as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are learning to their cost and as many other emergent Eastern Europeans nation states may soon demonstrate.5 Moreover, soon after independence, Third World countries discovered that colonialism simply froze the old rivalries into history. Once the colonial structures had disappeared, the old ethnic and minority questions returned to the fore. Similarly, communism did not solve national and minority disputes in Eastern Europe, it merely locked them away in the ice-chest of the police state. Eastern Europe is the Balkans, origin and cauldron of Balkanization. Its history of the past 500 years has been one of a consistent battle among nationalities, cultures and language groups. The very model that was held up to impel both reified nationalism and the horror of disintegration for artificially created Third World states was derived from the historic experi-
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Lessons from the Third World
ence of Eastern Europe, whose instability has bedevilled Europe for centuries. The continuity of the problem is a stark reminder of the limits of human ingenuity; there still is no answer to the urgent questions of plural nations within the ethos of the modern national state. The process of gaining independence for the Third World was momentous, every bit as much as the overthrow of totalitarian control is for Eastern Europe. The emergence of a new, sustainable political order proved far more problematic. Given the fact that Central Europe is the birthplace of nationalist rebellion, where it. acquired its mystique, Third-World-style independence movements, with all that entails in terms of violence and terror, are surely on the cards in the near future for many Eastern European countries. A recent US Times-Mirror poll on European attitudes confirms the trend: ‘In every country sampled in Eastern Europe, at least 40 per cent felt hostile to the main national minority. Most Poles, Hungarians and Bulgarians felt that part of their country lay within another country, and resented the fact: a substantial proportion of Lithuanians, Czechs and Salvaks and Germans felt the same.‘6 In Germany, just one year after unification, there has been a shocking upsurge reached
of nationalism and racism-indeed, an all-time high since the collapse
the
incidents
of racism
have
of the Third Reich. Moreover, the exponential rise in racism is not limited to former East Germany: in the prosperous cities of the West fire-bombings and stabbings of Romanians, Poles and Turks have become commonplace. Such developments, by introducing political instability, will not only strengthen the trends for underdevelopment in Eastern Europe and ensure its dependent status, but also say something about the desire of Eastern European countries to join the EC. Does the EC make a difference? When Eastern European countries speak of the ‘European home’, state their goals as ‘the return to Europe’, they define ‘Europe’ first and foremost as the EC. As noted above, the European roots of ex-Soviet satellites are the single most important difference between them and the Third World. But it is not just the common history that is so attractive. For the leaders of the Eastern European states, the EC exerts a tremendous attraction, because it symbolizes a coveted economic success, but above all it constitutes for them a successful ‘security community’ and a veritable &at de droit which has been able to overcome old antagonisms and imbalances of power . . . In the economic and strategic vacuum which has characterized Central and Eastern Europe after the failure of COMECON and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, they believe that accession to the EC will be a guarantee of economic development, a safeguard against a return to the old system and a warranty enabling them to avert the probable resurgence of nationalism and the resulting conflict.’
seen as a panacea for all problems-economic development, rise of nationalism and consequent Balkanization-that the Third World has continuously faced and which Eastern European states are set to encounter in the near future. But a return to Europe, however desirable it may be, is not going to be an easy task. The present harsh reality is that as a market the EC is closed to Eastern European states, while the Eastern
The EC is therefore
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European states themselves are totally open markets for the EC countries. This is a privileged and advantageous situation for the member states of the EC who, when it comes to the real crunch, will not be too disposed to a more equitable situation. Western Europe is competing with an increasingly powerful, more organized and more technologically advanced threat from Japan: it needs captured markets to offset the considerable advantages of Japan. In such a climate, the most realistic, and pessimistic, scenario is that Eastern Europe, like the Third World, will become a dumping ground for EC consumer goods and services. In an increasingly shrinking world, this is what the ‘free market forces’ dictate. The stalled Uruguay round is stalled because of the combat between the USA, EC and Japan over protectionism operated in contrast to the lip-service that all three give to the idea of free trade. There is also the ‘hopeful syndrome’ best exemplified by Turkey. Turkey becomes increasingly dependent and devoid of autonomy in order to fulfil the basic criteria for membership-political stability, implementation of aggressively monetarist policies, reduction of its agricultural base. However, given its present status and political structure it can never attain the stability that is required. This suits the EC rather well as it has a dependent satellite without the cost of admitting it to membership. Eastern European states may find themselves having the same status. Furthermore, there is the racist dimension: the questions asked of Turkey (is it really European?) could well be raised in the case of certain Eastern European countries. Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia are the vague boundary line where the question arises. Moreover, it is the horror of what the process of Balkanization did to the stability of Europe-ie being integral to the cause of the last two world wars-that is the major rationale for the existence and maintenance of the EC. The question would be raised: how can we allow these countries into the EC until they have resolved being the Balkans? There is, however, a definite probability, however small, that East European states will be integrated within the EC. However, this development too could produce equally disastrous results for the weak economies of Eastern Europe. Suppose, for the sake of argument, hurdles such as the Common Agriculture Policy can be overcome, and the EC is benevolent enough to allow the Eastern European states into the club. Would that mean that the Eastern European states would suddenly be on a sure path to development and that nationalism would be curbed? The most likely outcome of the sudden blast of competition from the EC’s more established and vastly more powerful economies would be to destroy much of the infant private industry in Eastern Europe. The exercise would be similar to Eastern Germany being. taken over by West Germany; and the consequences will be almost exactly the same. And if there were some economic gains to be made from the exercise, could the inner drive for autonomy and cultural expression and authenticity among ethnic minorities-which is surely the hallmark of the 199Os-be bought with economic gains? The key question to ask here is: is there or has there ever been a Eastern European ethos? And if there is a distinct Eastern European identity, or a number of identities, how will it/they respond to being once again submerged, especially if rising material standards fulfil Drucker’s dread promise of making nationalism the ‘ism’ of the bourgeoisie?8
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Lessons from the Third World
The point is that the EC is a club for the privileged few; these privileges can only be retained by the EC acting as a fortress against the rest of the world and operating in the old Bretton Woods economic order. Enlarging this club to bring in poverty-stricken and politically unstable Eastern European states would surely mean the loss of these privileges; no club behaves against its own best self-interests. The EC option is not open to Eastern European states, at least not in the near future. Conclusion We cannot see the liberation of Eastern Europe as simply a result of the failure of the Marxist system -as the ultimate triumph of capitalism. This would be too naive a response. It was, like the liberation of Third World countries, essentially a long-delayed process of decolonization. Like the British and French empires of the past, the Kremlin had to learn the limits of its power. Moreover, the wholesale rejection of communism in Eastern Europe was not purely pragmatic. It was not just that communism vaunted utopia and delivered economic malaise. Communism, like colonialism, dehumanized through its routine bureaucratic indignities, suppressed cultural expression, negated the history of ethnic minorities and trampled on the dignity of the individual. It was not just the physical and material necessity of standing in a bread queue that killed communism. It was what standing in a bread queue did to people and made them feel about themselves and the state in which they lived that spelt the death knell of communism. Those who revolted in the bread queues will soon find that replacing them with a scramble for a share of material plenty has its own set of indignities. The dole queue is as soul-destroying as the bread queue. The West may have the capacity to generate tremendous wealth and conspicuous consumption, but it has never devised the means of ensuring equitable distribution and genuine equality of access and opportunity. It is the citizens of the Third World who have the greatest experience of the consequences of this lack in the ideological matrix of capitalism. Eastern Europe may have returned to democracy; but democracy is not the empowering of the majority but the fake consultation of the mass by a system that is dominated and run by an entrenched elite that holds the levers of power. That is the conundrum of the Western democratic ideal out of which the Third World has been unable to break and which looks set to bedevil Eastern Europe. It is therefore natural for Eastern European states both to learn from the experience of the Third World and to make common cause with them, to add new and significant Western voices to the agenda for genuine structural change in the international economic order. Quite simply, Third World nations have got used to the awful truth: however laudable democratic ideals may be, they are almost impossible to realize when the aspirations of the state are: (a) to develop on established Western models; (b) to accommodate the pressure of dependence; and (c) to overcome the legacy of non-independent growth. The result has been a diversity of forms and shades of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, military regimes and persistent, all-pervading elite domination. In 1989 the dominoes in Eastern Europe fell in the direction of democracy. But, as the experience
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of developing countries teaches us, tomorrow they could just as easily fall again another way. A stark set of questions now faces Eastern Europe: the end of ideology is the beginning of what? Now that communism no longer exists, is capitalism the only option? Is the process created and envisioned at Bretton Woods now complete? Can the ideals of pluralism be sustained within the concept of the modern nation as instrumental rationality? What will provide national aspirations and inclusion ? What will ensure genuine freedom, including cultural and ethnic freedom, and participatory democracy, including economic democracy, for all? The answers could lead Eastern European countries to retrace the disastrous development paths of Third World states or towards their own unique roads to self-reliance and self-sufficiency and the creation of new models of ‘state’ which allow cultural fulfilment for all minorities and give them equal participation in governance. Notes and references 1. For a detailed analysis of the global economic structure, see Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Last chance for world unity’, New Scientist, 97, 6 August 1981, pages 334-341. Anatomy of a Global Failure (UNU, Tokyo, 1990). 2. See Samir Amin, Ma/development: 3. Joseph l-feller, Catch 22 (Jonathan Cape, London, 1962). Catch 22 in the novel was a regulation in the US airforce which specified that aircrew could only be grounded if they were insane and asked to be grounded. But to ask to be grounded for one’s own personal safety was the work of a rational mind, and therefore the airman could not be insane or grounded. . . 4. See Alvin Toffler, Powershit? (Bantam Books, New York, 199O), on how ‘an explosion of ethnics’ is undermining the nation-state (pages 243-244); and F. H. Hinsley on changing definitions of Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 19%). See Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Post-communist nationalism’, Foreign Affairs, M(5), Winter 1989-90, pages l-25 Neal Ascherson, ‘Old wounds exposed by post-communist thaw’, The independent on Sunday, 6 October 1991. Franc;dise de la Serre, ‘The integration dilemma: enlarging and/or deepening the Community’, futures, U(7), September 1991, pages 739-746. Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities (Mandarin, London, 1990).
FUTURES March 1992
THE FUTURE OF EASTERN EUROPE Lessons
from
the Third
World
Ziauddin Sardar and Merry1 Wyn Davies
Eastern European states are in a similar position to Third World countries just after their independence. There are three main parallels: both groups have to live with colonial legacies, both have gained independence within an economic order that discriminates against the non-industrialized countries, and both are marginaliz~ from the centres of political, economic and technological power. There is also one major difference: Eastern Europe can lay legitimate claims to be part of the dominant European civilization. On these assumptions, there are two pessimistic scenarios for the future of the ex-socialist European countries, with the following conclusion: given the strong parallels, Eastern Europe is set, no~ithstanding mem~~hip of the EC, to follow the classical patterns of Third World underdevelopment. As such, Eastern European countries should join hands with the Third World states to set an agenda for genuine structural changes in the global economic system.
A new world has been made by the disintegration of the Communist bloc. The patterns of the past 40 years no longer apply. This is a common argument. However, change is often a fickle illusion that masks tenacious continuities. The citizens of Eastern Europe may soon join the ranks of those who have had to learn that their brave new world is a perilous place. Today, Eastern European states are in a similar position to numerous Third World countries during their independence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although they have a slightly more developed, if somewhat obsolete and redundant, technological infrastructure, their position in the global economic order is not much different from many large developing countries such as India, Brazil and Egypt. The parallels between these developing countries and the newly liberated Eastern European states is the only appropriate analogy for understanding the challenges that face the emerging Ziauddin Sardar is a member of the Futures Advisory Board. Merry1 Wyn Davies is the author of Knowing One Another: Shaping an Islamic Anthropology (Mansell, London, 1988). They can be contacted via the publishers.
0016-3287/020150-08 @I 1992 Butterworth-Heinemann
Ltd
FUTURES
March 1992
Lessons from the Third World
151
nations of the East. There are significant differences, no doubt. Yet the similarities are the surest key to the questions that need to be debated. For this reason it is most likely that the matter will be brushed aside. It is far too embarrassing-politically as well as academically-for all concerned. Already, just two years after the European revolution, the euphoria of liberation is being replaced in Eastern Europe by a pessimism that is engendered by realization of insurmountable odds-a pessimism that Third World countries know so well. Liberation, or independence, as the states of Eastern Europe are learning to their cost, is not a cure-all; it is simply the assumption of a new set of problems and constraints. Soon, they will come to realize-as Third World countries have already realized-that reform is as much required by Western capitalism as it was by Stalinist communism. And, like so many thinkers in developing countries have known for so long, they may even come to terms with the knowledge that the language to discuss humane solutions is elusive in the realpolitik of both systems. There are three strong parallels, and one major difference, between the emergence of Third World countries during the past 40 years and the present situation of Eastern European states. Both groups are a product of a colonial history which, though different in its ideological make-up, is singularly homogeneous in its legacy-dependency. Both groups gained their ‘independence’ within a world order with well established rules of economic and commercial behaviour. Both groups are totally marginalized from the centres of political, economic, technological and cultural power. And the difference: unlike the Third World states, Eastern European countries can legitimately claim to be part of the dominant global civilization -they are essentially Western by possession of common roots in Western civilization and culture. Whether this will mark a point of departure between the development in the Third World over the past five decades and the possible future of Eastern Europe is a debatable point. Certainly, the ‘common ground’ between the Third World and Eastern Europe will be the major decisive factor shaping the future of ex-Soviet satellites. The new old world order Eastern Europe has the same periphery-to-centre relationship with the existing economic powers as the Third World. The Third World countries gained their independence in an international economic order that is also the chief inheritance of the newly liberated Eastern European states. The framework of this economic order was set up at the end of World War II by the Bretton Woods conference, held at the town of that name in the USA. It set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. At the Bretton Woods conference, the Western nations, having lost their empires, made institutional arrangement for continuing their domination and exploitation of the newly emerging nations. The Third World itself was not a party to the negotiations nor has it benefited from the results. Instead, it has discovered, to its cost and dismay, that the system was designed to discriminate against it and to ensure its dependence on the established power blocs in the industrialized countries. To this day, even though there have been some minor changes, the voting power in key institutions like the IMF reflects the world of the 1940s and 1950s. The Eastern European states are set to suffer
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lessons from the Third World
the same injustice from the existing world economic order as the Third World.’ The Third World nations have realized that all new worlds are founded on continuity. It is the continuity of the old international economic order that is shaping the ‘newness’ of a world transformed by the collapse of communism. As the Third World has found to its cost, you can swap one master for another and still remain slaves. What this means for Eastern Europe is that communism has been replaced by a new form of economic slavery: that of IMF, World Bank and multinational corporations’ monopoly capital. The iron curtain will soon be replaced by a poverty curtain, at least for the more southern of the former Soviet satellites. Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia may eventually be allowed to enter the EC (although, as we argue below, this could in itself be a new form of colonialism), but others-Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia-are most likely to be in the same position as Turkey, and the doors of the EC are unlikely to open for them. Thus, Eastern Europe is set to follow the old patterns of underdevelopment in the new order of the post-communist world.* More specifically, the future course of ‘development’ in Eastern Europe will have the following Third-World-type characteristics. (1) The IMF and World Bank will enforce the classical, top-down, capitalist model of development on Eastern European states. This will induce the newly liberated states into becoming satellites of industrialized nations. The material gains of this development will come through loss of autonomy, politically and morally, and expropriation of local control of resources, and will accrue to a tiny portion of the population which will become the new elite. As the Third World knows, material gains from IMF- and World Bank-backed development strategies take a long time to trickle down to the mass of the population, if at all. A tiny group of ‘haves’ will thus dominate a vast majority of ‘have-nots’; and a new breed of elite will run Eastern European states while the mass of the people will find themselves with few opportunities for betterment. (2) Eastern European nations are being given preferential treatment in the rescheduling of their debt burden to Western banks. But they, like the Third World, are trapped in the debt syndrome. They will find their room for manoeuvre and choice curtailed by the agenda of what is good and necessary set by remote and faceless money men. As aid flows to Eastern Europe, within a decade from now, its constituent states will find themselves in a similar debt trap to that of so many Third World countries: what this will mean in practical terms is that real resources will flow from Eastern Europe to the West, inducing deeper and deeper dependency with all the attendant consequences such as poverty, unemployment and social degradation. (3) The only economic countries, is cheap and end up supplying West all the fragility that this 22’3 that so many Third
edge of Eastern Europe, like so many developing abundant labour. Eastern European states will thus Europe with an ‘internal pool’ of cheap labour with gives to economic development. This is the ‘Catch World nations have suffered. The problem is not
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153
getting foreign investment to come into the country, but getting it to stay so that it can generate locally sustainable growth and to direct this investment in an appropriate and desirable direction. Multinational companies are not interested in investing in a technology that is useful or desirable for a developing nation; their concern is to find the cheapest labour for the manufacture of the individual components of their consumer goods which are actually put together at a totally different location. With such a new pool of labour clamouring for jobs there is no reason why multinational corporations should not have bonanza while the economies of Eastern Europe show little benefit from the hyperactivity. (4) Just as in the Third World, communism in Eastern Europe placed industrialization as a first priority in essentially agricultural and rural nations. The basic health of their economies has been deformed as has that of Third World nations by the neglect of agriculture and the failure to make a balance between urban needs for cheap food and adequate remuneration of rural labour. Adjusting that balance has proved an irreconcilable problem for Third World nations. Once the imbalance occurs it is virtually impossible to adjust it without provoking social unrest either in the city or the countryside. IMF- and World Bank-induced strategies will further enhance this imbalance in Eastern Europe, generating increasing social strife and unrest. The old new nationalism At independence, many Third World countries discovered that the departing, or not-so-departing, colonial powers had created purely artificial nationstates. Thus, for example, Pakistan was divided into ‘West’ and ‘East’ with a thousand miles of Indian territory between them; the Kurds were scattered between Iran, Iraq and Turkey; and the Sudan was put together from a ‘Muslim north’ and a ‘Christian south’. The Third World nation-states were designed to be unstable, to fall apart and to provide continuous and constant tensions to enable the newly independent states to be locked into a particular socioeconomic framework .4 Eastern European states also find themselves to be purely artificial entities: nationalism in itself is an insufficient rationale for creating a homogeneous state and is always subject to constant subdivision, as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are learning to their cost and as many other emergent Eastern Europeans nation states may soon demonstrate.5 Moreover, soon after independence, Third World countries discovered that colonialism simply froze the old rivalries into history. Once the colonial structures had disappeared, the old ethnic and minority questions returned to the fore. Similarly, communism did not solve national and minority disputes in Eastern Europe, it merely locked them away in the ice-chest of the police state. Eastern Europe is the Balkans, origin and cauldron of Balkanization. Its history of the past 500 years has been one of a consistent battle among nationalities, cultures and language groups. The very model that was held up to impel both reified nationalism and the horror of disintegration for artificially created Third World states was derived from the historic experi-
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Lessons from the Third World
ence of Eastern Europe, whose instability has bedevilled Europe for centuries. The continuity of the problem is a stark reminder of the limits of human ingenuity; there still is no answer to the urgent questions of plural nations within the ethos of the modern national state. The process of gaining independence for the Third World was momentous, every bit as much as the overthrow of totalitarian control is for Eastern Europe. The emergence of a new, sustainable political order proved far more problematic. Given the fact that Central Europe is the birthplace of nationalist rebellion, where it. acquired its mystique, Third-World-style independence movements, with all that entails in terms of violence and terror, are surely on the cards in the near future for many Eastern European countries. A recent US Times-Mirror poll on European attitudes confirms the trend: ‘In every country sampled in Eastern Europe, at least 40 per cent felt hostile to the main national minority. Most Poles, Hungarians and Bulgarians felt that part of their country lay within another country, and resented the fact: a substantial proportion of Lithuanians, Czechs and Salvaks and Germans felt the same.‘6 In Germany, just one year after unification, there has been a shocking upsurge reached
of nationalism and racism-indeed, an all-time high since the collapse
the
incidents
of racism
have
of the Third Reich. Moreover, the exponential rise in racism is not limited to former East Germany: in the prosperous cities of the West fire-bombings and stabbings of Romanians, Poles and Turks have become commonplace. Such developments, by introducing political instability, will not only strengthen the trends for underdevelopment in Eastern Europe and ensure its dependent status, but also say something about the desire of Eastern European countries to join the EC. Does the EC make a difference? When Eastern European countries speak of the ‘European home’, state their goals as ‘the return to Europe’, they define ‘Europe’ first and foremost as the EC. As noted above, the European roots of ex-Soviet satellites are the single most important difference between them and the Third World. But it is not just the common history that is so attractive. For the leaders of the Eastern European states, the EC exerts a tremendous attraction, because it symbolizes a coveted economic success, but above all it constitutes for them a successful ‘security community’ and a veritable &at de droit which has been able to overcome old antagonisms and imbalances of power . . . In the economic and strategic vacuum which has characterized Central and Eastern Europe after the failure of COMECON and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, they believe that accession to the EC will be a guarantee of economic development, a safeguard against a return to the old system and a warranty enabling them to avert the probable resurgence of nationalism and the resulting conflict.’
seen as a panacea for all problems-economic development, rise of nationalism and consequent Balkanization-that the Third World has continuously faced and which Eastern European states are set to encounter in the near future. But a return to Europe, however desirable it may be, is not going to be an easy task. The present harsh reality is that as a market the EC is closed to Eastern European states, while the Eastern
The EC is therefore
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European states themselves are totally open markets for the EC countries. This is a privileged and advantageous situation for the member states of the EC who, when it comes to the real crunch, will not be too disposed to a more equitable situation. Western Europe is competing with an increasingly powerful, more organized and more technologically advanced threat from Japan: it needs captured markets to offset the considerable advantages of Japan. In such a climate, the most realistic, and pessimistic, scenario is that Eastern Europe, like the Third World, will become a dumping ground for EC consumer goods and services. In an increasingly shrinking world, this is what the ‘free market forces’ dictate. The stalled Uruguay round is stalled because of the combat between the USA, EC and Japan over protectionism operated in contrast to the lip-service that all three give to the idea of free trade. There is also the ‘hopeful syndrome’ best exemplified by Turkey. Turkey becomes increasingly dependent and devoid of autonomy in order to fulfil the basic criteria for membership-political stability, implementation of aggressively monetarist policies, reduction of its agricultural base. However, given its present status and political structure it can never attain the stability that is required. This suits the EC rather well as it has a dependent satellite without the cost of admitting it to membership. Eastern European states may find themselves having the same status. Furthermore, there is the racist dimension: the questions asked of Turkey (is it really European?) could well be raised in the case of certain Eastern European countries. Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia are the vague boundary line where the question arises. Moreover, it is the horror of what the process of Balkanization did to the stability of Europe-ie being integral to the cause of the last two world wars-that is the major rationale for the existence and maintenance of the EC. The question would be raised: how can we allow these countries into the EC until they have resolved being the Balkans? There is, however, a definite probability, however small, that East European states will be integrated within the EC. However, this development too could produce equally disastrous results for the weak economies of Eastern Europe. Suppose, for the sake of argument, hurdles such as the Common Agriculture Policy can be overcome, and the EC is benevolent enough to allow the Eastern European states into the club. Would that mean that the Eastern European states would suddenly be on a sure path to development and that nationalism would be curbed? The most likely outcome of the sudden blast of competition from the EC’s more established and vastly more powerful economies would be to destroy much of the infant private industry in Eastern Europe. The exercise would be similar to Eastern Germany being. taken over by West Germany; and the consequences will be almost exactly the same. And if there were some economic gains to be made from the exercise, could the inner drive for autonomy and cultural expression and authenticity among ethnic minorities-which is surely the hallmark of the 199Os-be bought with economic gains? The key question to ask here is: is there or has there ever been a Eastern European ethos? And if there is a distinct Eastern European identity, or a number of identities, how will it/they respond to being once again submerged, especially if rising material standards fulfil Drucker’s dread promise of making nationalism the ‘ism’ of the bourgeoisie?8
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The point is that the EC is a club for the privileged few; these privileges can only be retained by the EC acting as a fortress against the rest of the world and operating in the old Bretton Woods economic order. Enlarging this club to bring in poverty-stricken and politically unstable Eastern European states would surely mean the loss of these privileges; no club behaves against its own best self-interests. The EC option is not open to Eastern European states, at least not in the near future. Conclusion We cannot see the liberation of Eastern Europe as simply a result of the failure of the Marxist system -as the ultimate triumph of capitalism. This would be too naive a response. It was, like the liberation of Third World countries, essentially a long-delayed process of decolonization. Like the British and French empires of the past, the Kremlin had to learn the limits of its power. Moreover, the wholesale rejection of communism in Eastern Europe was not purely pragmatic. It was not just that communism vaunted utopia and delivered economic malaise. Communism, like colonialism, dehumanized through its routine bureaucratic indignities, suppressed cultural expression, negated the history of ethnic minorities and trampled on the dignity of the individual. It was not just the physical and material necessity of standing in a bread queue that killed communism. It was what standing in a bread queue did to people and made them feel about themselves and the state in which they lived that spelt the death knell of communism. Those who revolted in the bread queues will soon find that replacing them with a scramble for a share of material plenty has its own set of indignities. The dole queue is as soul-destroying as the bread queue. The West may have the capacity to generate tremendous wealth and conspicuous consumption, but it has never devised the means of ensuring equitable distribution and genuine equality of access and opportunity. It is the citizens of the Third World who have the greatest experience of the consequences of this lack in the ideological matrix of capitalism. Eastern Europe may have returned to democracy; but democracy is not the empowering of the majority but the fake consultation of the mass by a system that is dominated and run by an entrenched elite that holds the levers of power. That is the conundrum of the Western democratic ideal out of which the Third World has been unable to break and which looks set to bedevil Eastern Europe. It is therefore natural for Eastern European states both to learn from the experience of the Third World and to make common cause with them, to add new and significant Western voices to the agenda for genuine structural change in the international economic order. Quite simply, Third World nations have got used to the awful truth: however laudable democratic ideals may be, they are almost impossible to realize when the aspirations of the state are: (a) to develop on established Western models; (b) to accommodate the pressure of dependence; and (c) to overcome the legacy of non-independent growth. The result has been a diversity of forms and shades of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, military regimes and persistent, all-pervading elite domination. In 1989 the dominoes in Eastern Europe fell in the direction of democracy. But, as the experience
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of developing countries teaches us, tomorrow they could just as easily fall again another way. A stark set of questions now faces Eastern Europe: the end of ideology is the beginning of what? Now that communism no longer exists, is capitalism the only option? Is the process created and envisioned at Bretton Woods now complete? Can the ideals of pluralism be sustained within the concept of the modern nation as instrumental rationality? What will provide national aspirations and inclusion ? What will ensure genuine freedom, including cultural and ethnic freedom, and participatory democracy, including economic democracy, for all? The answers could lead Eastern European countries to retrace the disastrous development paths of Third World states or towards their own unique roads to self-reliance and self-sufficiency and the creation of new models of ‘state’ which allow cultural fulfilment for all minorities and give them equal participation in governance. Notes and references 1. For a detailed analysis of the global economic structure, see Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Last chance for world unity’, New Scientist, 97, 6 August 1981, pages 334-341. Anatomy of a Global Failure (UNU, Tokyo, 1990). 2. See Samir Amin, Ma/development: 3. Joseph l-feller, Catch 22 (Jonathan Cape, London, 1962). Catch 22 in the novel was a regulation in the US airforce which specified that aircrew could only be grounded if they were insane and asked to be grounded. But to ask to be grounded for one’s own personal safety was the work of a rational mind, and therefore the airman could not be insane or grounded. . . 4. See Alvin Toffler, Powershit? (Bantam Books, New York, 199O), on how ‘an explosion of ethnics’ is undermining the nation-state (pages 243-244); and F. H. Hinsley on changing definitions of Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 19%). See Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Post-communist nationalism’, Foreign Affairs, M(5), Winter 1989-90, pages l-25 Neal Ascherson, ‘Old wounds exposed by post-communist thaw’, The independent on Sunday, 6 October 1991. Franc;dise de la Serre, ‘The integration dilemma: enlarging and/or deepening the Community’, futures, U(7), September 1991, pages 739-746. Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities (Mandarin, London, 1990).
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