I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday
2012; Hoover Institution; Issue: 172 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-5945
Autores Tópico(s)Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition
ResumoSLOWLY, EVER SO slowly, we are realizing, or at least should I be, that the fundamental reordering of Europe that began with the crumbling collapse of overextended and unsustainable communist glacis in the late 1980s has had far greater and far-reaching reverberations than we then would or could have predicted. Soviet-style communism, even in the short run unworkable form of despotism since its imposition in 1917, remained so through its iteration by military force and occupation in Eastern Europe in the 1940s. We know that crony capitalism leads to economic busts but crony communism never really even gets off the ground, just seedy privilege-- bigger bad cars, better bad health care, better bad education for the children of the well-connected-- justified not by achievement but by self-appointment to bring about a more radiant future, because only the self-appointed party is capable of giving hope of a better future. We will shortly meet this phrase again. Deng Xiaoping realized already in the late 1970s, a decade before the collapse of what by then was simply a Soviet khrushchyovka of worn-out cards that a society or a country cannot borrow on the future, that productive creative labor is what must needs be allowed, and that privilege without merit leads to Soviet-style stagnation. Deng realized stratification based on party membership, not on accomplishment, was unsustainable and proclaimed: is glorious to get rich. He didn't say, nota bene, that it is glorious to have free speech and free and fair elections. China realized it needed to change and embraced capitalism without democracy. Moscow was more obtuse, at least until the second half of the 1980s. In the West even fewer got it, telling themselves that East Europeans really liked to be enserted, and for most of my adult lite, I found that people in the West actually had come to believe it. Happy Estonians building the Baikal Amur highway, wholesome Polish plumbers, tanned Lithuanian kolkhozniks bringing in the sheaves somehow lulled people into believing it was an alternative, a different way to do things toward which we too would move in some kind of Utopian convergence. But then communism collapsed and Western Europe was faced with its Uh-oh, now what? problem: all those poor cousins at its doorstep and no more barbed wire, wall, or indeed any other kind of gate. A continent of exiles-- people who talked about communism just the way the excoriated emigres from the East had been talking, unpleasantly, uncomfortably for all those years. And even those who didn't buy the convergence myth or the silly Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament line-- about Russians loving their children, too, and therefore Moscow harbored no ill will toward the West, and maybe for them freedom of speech is just another term for nothing left to say-- well, they were stung. For 50 years since the Atlantic Charter, those of us East and West who didn't believe it was all okay instead believed the rhetoric that we would all be one were it not for the evil Soviet Union and its lack of democracy, and that we could redeem ourselves from the graceless half century by working hard, speaking freely, following the rules, and doing our homework. We believed that Western Europe yearned for us as we yearned for it, as Aristophanes described in Plato's Symposium, two halves of a whole split by the gods, perpetually seeking our other half, to live in a Europe whole and free. It turned out to be much more complicated. With the end of communism it was time to redeem those bonds and vouchers of the ideologized 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. We discovered that to Western Europe the liberation of enserfed and silenced Easterners turned out instead to mean social dumping by Polish plumbers in France, and lazy Latvian construction workers in Sweden, and in our case-- to believe some Finnish newspapers from as late as Spring to 2011, criminals from Tallinn disembarking each night in Helsinki harbor by the hundreds-- or, the expression I heard in Munich already in 1990 from my Hausmeisterin after my bicycle was stolen, Heute gestohlen, morgen in Polen (stolen today, tomorrow in Poland). …
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