On Wed, 1 Oct 1997, Arno Tausch wrote:
> with all the problems that exist in the transformation countries, I think
> the whole tone and content of the debate is absolutely mistaken. Much of
> what today is termed "mafia structures" had their roots in the 1960s, 1970s
> and even more so in the 1980s. Think about all these people who were shot
> or marched to death from September 1939 onwards in Poland by both occupying
> powers; think about the repression in the postwar years, the hardships of
> reconstruction, the lies, the shootings in Poznan 1956, the anti-zionist
> campaign 1968, the repression in Gdansk 1970, Giereks debt-ridden
> "socialism", the mobilization of society against the bureaucratic
> structures in 1980, marshall law in 1981. By all means Poland is light
> years away from all this - thanks be God. Yet structures have to be found
> that allow Central Eastern Europe and the other transformation countries a
> proper and rightful place in world society. The UNDP Poland has published
> wonderful Human Development Reports Poland in English since 1995 about
> these dimensions, and all participants in the "comrade" debate are kindly
> invited to read these materials - about the advances and contradictions of
> transformation. Those of you that read German, might also consult my recent
>
> Schwierige Heimkehr. Sozialpolitik, Migration, Transformation und die
> Osterweiterung der EU. Eberhard Verlag, Munich, 1997.
>
> I of course agree with all of you who see the dangers in the
> centre-periphery relationship that evolves between East and West. Again,
> Samir Amin, whom we all too often neglect simply because he writes in
> French, has provided us with pioneering insights about the global character
> of the "tequila effect". What are the solutions? That would be a true
> debate.
An excellent posting. It's true, the Left has not done its homework
on Eastern Europe or, for that matter, the autarkic regimes of East Asia.
Not to dredge up the whole sorry history of the Cold War's erasure of
dialectics in the American context, but it is depressing to hear alleged
radicals go on about the wonders of Soviet bread subsidies and castigate
the emptiness of freedom of the press, religion, etc. Human rights ARE
workers' rights, and vice versa, and socialists who forget this are no
socialists at all.
My own feeling is that the European Union has to play the essential role
in preventing Eastern Europe from becoming a broken-down, Latin-American
style neocolony of the West. The reason I'm generally hopeful about the
EU -- as opposed to my own personal gloom about the USA, which
is gripped by an unprecedented speculative madness and social polarization
right now ("more like Bangladesh every day", as a friend of mine put it
caustically) -- is that there are genuine possibilities for
reconstruction. Austria, so I hear, has been making a lot of investments
in Czech, Hungarian and Polish industry; Scandinavia has been bailing out
the Baltics; and of course Germany has piled $100 billion a year into
Eastern Germany -- which is why the Visegrad region is growing like mad.
Why can't the EU get a genuinely European-sized initiative going, i.e.
co-finance not just Visegrad, but the entire Eastern bloc? Given the EU's
GDP of maybe $8 trillion, and the East's GDP of maybe $400 billion, I
don't think the financial burdens would be insurmountable.
I'm no economist, but I'd guess that the investment priorities ought
to be some basic infrastructure, education, cultural exchanges, and most
of all debt relief on the credits the former Communist regimes piled up
during the 1970s and 1980s. The Eastern countries do have the tools to
succeed, they're well-educated and are developing coherent developmental
states. They could certainly learn a great deal just by studying Austria's
own rise from bankrupt semi-periphery to one of the richest countries in
the world -- i.e. the importance of a strong public sector, powerful trade
unions, and state-run banking institutions. The point would be to avoid
the tequila effect by socializing capital, ensuring that it gets invested
in productive assets and workers' paychecks, instead of the bank accounts
and dubious financial speculations of a narrow, greedy elite; this is
basically the same strategy pursued by South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore,
with of course regional variations (more reliance in Singapore on
multinationals, more reliance in South Korea on the giant chaebol,
greater emphasis in Taiwan on the Nationalist one-party state).
Of course, this would require expansive, growing markets in the EU itself
-- which would play roughly the same role in the East as the US did
by financing Japan and Western Europe in the Fifties, i.e. through some
sort of Eurokeynesianism or other variant of a globalized
Sozialdemokratie.
Or so I would argue. Comments/critiques are welcome!
-- Dennis