Part 13

"The core idea that economic structure determines everything has been especially pernicious ... The idea that ... rights have a deeper moral underpinning is an illusion. Morality itself is an illusion., just another weapon of the ruling class. As Gyorgy Lukasc put it, 'Communist ethics makes it the highest duty to act wickedly ... This is the greatest sacrifice revolution asks from us.' Human agency is null: we are mere dupes of 'the system', until we repudiate it outright. What goes for ethics also goes for history, literature, the rest of the humanities and the social sciences. The 'late Marxist' sees them all ... not as subjects for disinterested intellectual inquiry but as forms of social control."

Many in Europe feel that the above paragraph might as well have been written about Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Reduced to bare-bones materialism, it is amoral, if not immoral. It upholds natural selection instead of ethics, prefers money to values, wealth formation to social solidarity.

Predators everywhere - Russian oligarchs, central European cronies, Balkan kleptocrats, east European managers - find this gratifying. All others regard capitalism as yet another rigid and unforgiving creed, this time imposed from Washington by the IMF and multinationals rather as communism was enjoined from Moscow by the Kremlin.

With eight of the former communist countries about to become members of the European Union - albeit second rate ones - transition is entering is most fascinating phase. Exposed hitherto to American teachings and practices, the new members are forced to adhere to a whole different rule book - all 82,000 pages of it.

European "capitalism" is really a hybrid of the socialist and liberal teachings of the 19th century. It emphasizes consensus, community, solidarity, equality, stability and continuity. It places these values above profitability, entrepreneurship, competition, individualism, mobility, size, litigation and the use of force. Europeans firmly believe that the workings of the market should be tampered with and that it is the responsibility of the state to see to it that no one gets left behind or trampled upon.

European stakeholder capitalism is paternalistic and inclusive. Employees, employers, the government, communities and suppliers are partners in the decision making process or privies to it. Relics of past models of the market economy still abound in this continent: industrial policy, Keynesian government spending, development aid, export and production subsidies, trade protectionism, the state-sanctioned support of nascent and infant industries. Mild corporatism is rife and manifest in central wage bargaining.

For some countries - notably Estonia - joining the EU would translate into a de-liberalized and re-regulated future. Others would find the EU's brand of the market a comfortable and dimly familiar middle ground between America's harsh prescriptions and communism's delusional model. The EU's faceless and Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Brussels - Moscow revisited - should prove to be a relief compared to the IMF's ruffians.

The EU is evolving into a land empire, albeit glacially. The polities of central and eastern Europe were always constituents of empires - reluctantly or by choice. In some ways they are better suited to form an "ever closer union" than the more veteran members.

Eastern Advantages

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

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Lessons in Transition

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Leapfrogging Transition - Technology and Post Communism

Many of the nations of central and east Europe have spent most of their history as components of one empire or another. People in this region are used to be at the receiving end of directives and planning from the center. Though ostensibly fervid nationalists, they are ill at ease with their re-founded and re-found nation-states.

The identity of the denizens of these parts is more regional than national and evolving towards the supra-national. People are from this or that city, or district, or village. And they aspire to become citizens of Europe and the great experiment of the European Union. They are only hesitantly and tentatively Macedonians, or Moldovans, or Belarusians, or Kazakhs, or Yugoslavs.

The likes of the Czechs, the Estonians and the Slovenes are well-suited to become constituents of a larger whole. They make better Europeans than the British, or the Norwegians. They have survived far mightier and more bloated bureaucracies than Brussels'. They are unsurpassed manipulators of officialdom. In the long run, the new members stand to benefit the most from the EU's enlargement and to form its unwaveringly loyal core.

Not yet the full-fledged individualists of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism - these nations are consensus-seeking team-players. Tutored by centuries of occupation and hardship, they are instinctual multilateralists. They are avid Westerners by persuasion, if not yet in practice, or geography.

Moreover, their belated conversion to the ways of the market is an undisguised blessing.

Though still a promise largely unfulfilled, the countries in transition could now leapfrog whole stages of development by adopting novel technologies and through them the expensive Western research they embody. The East can learn from the West's mistakes and, by avoiding them, achieve a competitive edge.

Technology is a social phenomenon with social implications. It fosters entrepreneurship and social mobility. By allowing the countries in transition to skip massive investments in outdated technologies - the cellular phone, the Internet, cable TV, and the satellite become shortcuts to prosperity.

Poverty is another invaluable advantage.

With the exception of Slovenia, Estonia, Croatia and the Czech Republic - the population of the countries in transition is poor, sometimes inordinately so. Looming and actual penury is a major driver of entrepreneurship, initiative and innovation. Wealth formation and profit seeking are motivated by indigence, both absolute and relative. The poor seek to better their position in the world by becoming middle-class. They invest in education, in small businesses, in consumer products, in future generations.

The Germans - sated and affluent - are unlikely to experience a second economic miracle. The Serbs, Albanians, Ukrainians, Poles, or Romanians won't survive without one. The West is just discovering this truth and is opening its gates - albeit xenophobically and intermittently - to poorer foreigners. For what is immigration if not the importation of ambitious indigents, certain to revitalize the EU's rich and somnolent economies?

The countries of central and eastern Europe, thus, stand to benefit twice.

Their own economic Renaissance is spurred on by a striving home-grown proletariat. And they are uniquely positioned - geographically and culturally - to export destitute go-getters to the wealthy West and to reap the rewards of the inevitable spurt in entrepreneurship and innovation that follows. Remittances, returning expatriates, thriving and networked Diasporas would do more to uplift the countries of origin than any amount of oft-misallocated multilateral aid.