The Belgian Curtain: Europe after Communism Part 5

Populists of all stripes combine calls for a thinly disguised "strong man" dictatorship with exclusionary racist xenophobia, strong anti-EU sentiments, conspiracy theory streaks of paranoia, the revival of an imaginary rustic and family-centered utopia, fears of unemployment and economic dest.i.tution, regionalism and local patriotism

Though far from the mainstream and often derided and ignored - they succeeded to radicalize both the right and the left in central Europe, as they have done in the west. Thus, mainstream parties were forced to adopt a more a.s.sertive foreign policy tinged with ominous nationalism (Hungary) and anti-Europeanism (Poland, Hungary). There has been a measurable shift in public opinion as well - towards disenchantment with EU enlargement and overtly exclusionary nationalism. This was aided by Brussels' lukewarm welcome, discriminatory and protectionist practices, and bureaucratic indecisiveness.

These worrisome tendencies are balanced by the inertia of the process.

Politicians of all colors are committed to the European project.

Carping aside, the countries of central Europe stand to reap significant economic benefits from their EU membership. Still, the outcome of this clash between parochial nationalism and Europeanism is far from certain and, contrary to received wisdom, the process is reversible.

THE CENTRALISTS versus THE REGIONALISTS

The recent bickering about the Benes decrees proves that the vision of a "Europe of regions" is ephemeral. True, the century old nation state has weakened greatly and the centripetal energy of regions has increased. But this applies only to h.o.m.ogeneous states.

Minorities tend to disrupt this continuity and majorities do their d.a.m.nedest to eradicate these discontinuities by various means - from a.s.similation (central Europe) to extermination (the Balkan). Hungary's policies - its status law and the economic benefits it bestowed upon expatriate Hungarians - is the epitome of such tendencies.

These axes of tension delineate and form central Europe's political landscape. The Procrustean categories of "left" and "right" do injustice to these subtleties. As central Europe matures into fully functioning capitalistic liberal democracies, proper leftwing parties and their rightwing adversaries are bound to emerge. But this is still in the future.

Forward to the Past

Capitalism in Post-Communist Europe

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

The core countries of Central Europe (the Czech Republic, Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Poland) experienced industrial capitalism in the inter-war period. But the countries comprising the vast expanses of the New Independent States, Russia and the Balkan had no real acquaintance with it. To them its zealous introduction is nothing but another ideological experiment and not a very rewarding one at that.

It is often said that there is no precedent to the extant fortean transition from totalitarian communism to liberal capitalism. This might well be true. Yet, nascent capitalism is not without historical example. The study of the birth of capitalism in feudal Europe may yet lead to some surprising and potentially useful insights.

The Barbarian conquest of the teetering Roman Empire (410-476 AD) heralded five centuries of existential insecurity and mayhem. Feudalism was the countryside's reaction to this d.a.m.nation. It was a Hobson's choice and an explicit trade-off. Local lords defended their va.s.sals against nomad intrusions in return for perpetual service bordering on slavery. A small percentage of the population lived on trade behind the ma.s.sive walls of Medieval cities.

In most parts of central, eastern and southeastern Europe, feudalism endured well into the twentieth century. It was entrenched in the legal systems of the Ottoman Empire and of Czarist Russia. Elements of feudalism survived in the mellifluous and prolix prose of the Habsburg codices and patents. Most of the denizens of these moribund swathes of Europe were farmers - only the profligate and parasitic members of a distinct minority inhabited the cities. The present brobdignagian agricultural sectors in countries as diverse as Poland and Macedonia attest to this continuity of feudal practices.

Both manual labour and trade were derided in the Ancient World. This derision was partially eroded during the Dark Ages. It survived only in relation to trade and other "non-productive" financial activities and even that not past the thirteenth century. Max Weber, in his opus, "The City" (New York, MacMillan, 1958) described this mental shift of paradigm thus: "The medieval citizen was on the way towards becoming an economic man ... the ancient citizen was a political man".

What communism did to the lands it permeated was to freeze this early feudal frame of mind of disdain towards "non-productive", "city-based"

vocations. Agricultural and industrial occupations were romantically extolled. The cities were berated as hubs of moral turpitude, decadence and greed. Political awareness was made a precondition for personal survival and advancement. The clock was turned back.

Weber's "h.o.m.o Economicus" yielded to communism's supercilious version of the ancient Greeks' "Zoon Politikon". John of Salisbury might as well have been writing for a communist agitprop department when he penned this in "Policraticus" (1159 AD): "...if (rich people, people with private property) have been stuffed through excessive greed and if they hold in their contents too obstinately, (they) give rise to countless and incurable illnesses and, through their vices, can bring about the ruin of the body as a whole". The body in the text being the body politic.

This inimical att.i.tude should have come as no surprise to students of either urban realities or of communism, their parricidal off-spring.

The city liberated its citizens from the bondage of the feudal labour contract. And it acted as the supreme guarantor of the rights of private property. It relied on its trading and economic prowess to obtain and secure political autonomy. John of Paris, arguably one of the first capitalist cities (at least according to Braudel), wrote: "(The individual) had a right to property which was not with impunity to be interfered with by superior authority - because it was acquired by (his) own efforts" (in Georges Duby, "The age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1981).

Despite the fact that communism was an urban phenomenon (albeit with rustic roots) - it abnegated these "bourgeoisie" values. Communal ownership replaced individual property and servitude to the state replaced individualism. In communism, feudalism was restored. Even geographical mobility was severely curtailed, as was the case in feudalism. The doctrine of the Communist party monopolized all modes of thought and perception - very much as the church-condoned religious strain did 700 years before.

Communism was characterized by tensions between party, state and the economy - exactly as the medieval polity was plagued by conflicts between church, king and merchants-bankers. Paradoxically, communism was a faithful re-enactment of pre-capitalist history.

Communism should be well distinguished from Marxism. Still, it is ironic that even Marx's "scientific materialism" has an equivalent in the twilight times of feudalism. The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed a concerted effort by medieval scholars to apply "scientific"

principles and human knowledge to the solution of social problems. The historian R. W. Southern called this period "scientific humanism" (in "Flesh and Stone" by Richard Sennett, London, Faber and Faber, 1994).

We mentioned John of Salisbury's "Policraticus". It was an effort to map political functions and interactions into their human physiological equivalents. The king, for instance, was the brain of the body politic.

Merchants and bankers were the insatiable stomach. But this apparently simplistic a.n.a.logy masked a schismatic debate. Should a person's position in life be determined by his political affiliation and "natural" place in the order of things - or should it be the result of his capacities and their exercise (merit)? Do the ever changing contents of the economic "stomach", its kaleidoscopic innovativeness, its "permanent revolution" and its propensity to a.s.sume "irrational"

risks - adversely affect this natural order which, after all, is based on tradition and routine? In short: is there an inherent incompatibility between the order of the world (read: the church doctrine) and meritocratic (democratic) capitalism? Could Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica" (the world as the body of Christ) be reconciled with "Stadt Luft Macht Frei" ("city air liberates" - the sign above the gates of the cities of the Hanseatic League)?

This is the eternal tension between the individual and the group.

Individualism and communism are not new to history and they have always been in conflict. To compare the communist party to the church is a well-worn clich?. Both religions - the secular and the divine - were threatened by the spirit of freedom and initiative embodied in urban culture, commerce and finance. The order they sought to establish, propagate and perpetuate conflicted with basic human drives and desires. Communism was a throwback to the days before the ascent of the urbane, capitalistic, sophisticated, incredulous, individualistic and risqu? West. it sought to subst.i.tute one kind of "scientific"

determinism (the body politic of Christ) by another (the body politic of "the Proletariat"). It failed and when it unravelled, it revealed a landscape of toxic devastation, frozen in time, an ossified natural order bereft of content and adherents. The post-communist countries have to pick up where it left them, centuries ago. It is not so much a problem of lacking infrastructure as it is an issue of pathologized minds, not so much a matter of the body as a dysfunction of the psyche.

The historian Walter Ullman says that John of Salisbury thought (850 years ago) that "the individual's standing within society... (should be) based upon his office or his official function ... (the greater this function was) the more scope it had, the weightier it was, the more rights the individual had." (Walter Ullman, "The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages", Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). I cannot conceive of a member of the communist nomenklatura who would not have adopted this formula wholeheartedly. If modern capitalism can be described as "back to the future", communism was surely "forward to the past'.

Transition in Context

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

Also Read

Lessons in Transition

Is Transition Possible?

The Rip van Winkle Inst.i.tutions

The Author of this Article is a Racist

The Eureka Connection

Women in Transition:

From Post Feminism to Past Femininity

Axes to Grind - The Taxonomy of Political Conflict

The Solow Paradox

Forward to the Past - Capitalism in Post-Communist Europe

Leapfrogging Transition - Technology and Post Communism

Contracting for Transition

Women in Transition

The Kleptocracies of the East

The Washington Consensus - I. The IMF

The implosion of communism was often presented - not least by Francis f.u.kuyama in his celebrated "The end of History" - as the incontrovertible victory of economic liberalism over Marxism. In truth, the battle raged for seven decades between two strands of socialism.

Social democracy was conceived in the 19th century as a benign alternative to the revolutionary belligerence of Marx and Engels. It sparred with communism - the virulent and authoritarian species of socialism that Marxism has mutated into. European history between 1946-1989 was not a clash of diametrically opposed ideologies - but an internecine war between two competing interpretations of the same doctrine.

Both contestants boasted a single market - the European Union and COMECON, respectively. In both the state was heavily involved in the economy and owned a sizable chunk of the means of production, though in the Soviet Union and its satellites, the state was the economy.