First, a copy-right request - Dennis (or is it WSN?), can, I please, use
the analysis of Asian meltdown in my world-systems class at Northwestern? I
have 197 rather curious kids, who often presume they should become
international consultants. This is well-written, sobering, and provocative.
Secondly, we should add the coercive, here mainly military dimension to the
analysis. In August I talked at the airshow outside Moscow to the exports
manager of the Komsomolsk-on-Amur aircraft-building plant. They make Su-29s
and Su-37s, the Sukhoi fighter-bombers, a terrificly destructive machine.
Russian Air Force purchased (and paid) its last Su in 1991. The factory
employs just under one-third of Komsomolsk's entire population of 334
thousand. Yegor Gaidar during his Premiership in 1992 visited Komsomolsk
and said that, according to his calculations, its "optimal" population size
should be no more than 20
thousand, but how could anyone afford to relocate now from the Far East to
heartland Russia? The factory executives know that realistically
they would have to live with their workers in a small town on the Chinese border
for years to come. Therefore, the factory boldly fights for profits looking
for new markets which they obtained in South-East Asia. The man with whom I
spoke was very open - yes, they know about scores of possible conflicts,
yes, back in the Soviet times he heard about Indonesia's treatment of the
communists, they consider them none of the factory's business (it's
business is to assure the survival of Komsomolsk) -- the airplanes will be
produced and sold as cheaply as it takes to preserve the share of world
markets. Moscow has little say in
this business -- it cannot even remove the local governor-warlord who
threatens to wage his own border war on China if Moscow's diplomats
surrender any of the land he consideres his own fiefdom.
In Europe, however, Moscow's control over the policy is much better. No
jokes like selling jets for palm oil. Moscow got so offended by the NATO
expansion primarily because it explicitly denies the only role such a state
could hope to obtain in the outer peripmeter of EU - being the well-paid
enforcer of order in the adjacent "volatile" regions (the Balkans, the
Caucasus, even the Middle East -- Zhirinovsky always sounds outrageous, but
he isn't quite as crazy as he himself pretends. He reads Huntington, just
as Lebed reads Wallerstein, or at leats, his aides' memos)
Russian ruling elite experimented with neo-liberalism after 1991, it didn't
work; it experimented with neo-imperialism in 1994 in Chechnya, but it
backfired and brought the NATO expansion; so, Moscow is drifting on, sort
of an iceberg in murky ocean.
Georgi Derluguian
__________________________________________
Georgi M. Derluguian
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, IL 60208-1330
USA
Tel.: (847) 491-2741
FAX (847) 491-9907