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From Post-Communism to Civil Society: The Reemergence of History and the Decline of the Western Model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2009

John Gray
John Gray
Affiliation:
Politics, Jesus College, Oxford University
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Extract

For virtually all the major schools of Western opinion, the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, between 1989 and 1991, represents a triumph of Western values, ideas, and institutions. If, for triumphal conservatives, the events of late 1989 encompassed an endorsement of “democratic capitalism” that augured “the end of history,” for liberal and social democrats they could be understood as the repudiation by the peoples of the former Soviet bloc of Marxism-Leninism in all its varieties, and the reemergence of a humanist socialism that was free of Bolshevik deformation. The structure of political and economic institutions appropriate to the transition from post-Communism in the Soviet bloc to genuine civil society was, accordingly, modeled on Western exemplars—the example of Anglo-American democratic capitalism, of Swedish social democracy, or of the German social market economy— or on various modish Western academic conceptions, long abandoned in the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, such as market socialism. No prominent school of thought in the West doubted that the dissolution of Communist power was part of a process of Westernization in which contemporary Western ideas and institutions could and would successfully be exported to the former Communist societies. None questioned the idea that, somewhere in the repertoire of Western theory and practice, there was a model for conducting the transition from the bankrupt institutions of socialist central planning, incorporated into the structure of a totalitarian state, to market institutions and a liberal democratic state. Least of all did anyone question the desirability, or the possibility, of reconstituting economic and political institutions on Western models, in most parts of the former Soviet bloc.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Summer 1993 , pp. 26 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1993

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References

1 See Fukuyama, Francis, “The End of History,” in National Interest, Summer 1989.Google Scholar

2 On this, see my article “Totalitarianism, Reform, and Civil Society,” in Totalitarianism at the Crossroads, ed. Paul, Ellen Frankel (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp. 97–142.Google Scholar

3 For further evidence on this, see my monograph The Strange Death of Perestroika: Causes and Consequences of the Soviet Coup (London: Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, European Security Study, 13, 1990).Google Scholar

4 I owe the term “counter-intelligence state” to Dziak, John J., who uses it in his book Chekisty: A History of the KGB (Lexington: Lexington Books, D. C. Heath and Co., 1988).Google Scholar

5 Evidence on this is given in my monograph The Strange Death of Perestroika.

6 In the Times Literary Supplement of 07 27, 1989Google Scholar, I wrote: “Whatever the immediate outcome of current negotiations, it is safe to assert that neither the division of Germany in its present form, nor West Germany's current relationship with NATO, can be sustained for long. As it stands, the political and military posture of West Germany disregards both the realities of history and legitimate German aspirations for unification; and the pressures for a separate settlement between West Germany and the Soviet Union are probably irresistible. … The darker side of the dissolution of the post-war settlement is in the prospect of … West Germany prised loose from NATO only to inherit the rusting industries and indigent pensioners of the GDR.” I wrote in The Financial Times, London, 09 13, 1989Google Scholar: “The danger is that the decay of the totalitarian system built up by Stalin and Lenin will result not in the reconstitution of a stable civil society, but in mounting chaos and economic collapse. … If this is so, then what we are witnessing in the Soviet Union is not the middle of a reform, but the beginning of a revolution, whose course no-one can foretell.” In October 1989 in Totalitarianism at the Crossroads, p. 134Google Scholar, I wrote: “… classical Communist totalitarianism is already showing signs of weakness (as in Bulgaria) and even Romania may not prove immune to change or collapse. … The model for such a prospect … may be contemporary Yugoslavia, with its intractable ethnic conflicts, profound economic problems, weak populist governments, and chronic tendencies toward political disintegration.” These warnings were widely dismissed as alarmist.

7 They remain powerful partly in virtue of their collusion with organized crime in Russia.

8 I have discussed the German social market economy at length in my monograph The Moral Foundations of Market Institutions (London: Institute for Economic Affairs, 1992).Google Scholar

9 See Ibid., p. 83.

10 Ibid., p. 98.

11 See Hayek, F. A., The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960)Google Scholar, ch. 11, for this erroneous generalization.

12 I refer in particular to Buchanan, 's “Tacit Presuppositions of Political Economy: Implications for Societies in Transition” (George Mason University, Fairfax, VA: Center for Study of Public Choice, 1991), mimeograph.Google Scholar

13 I owe these data to an excellent paper by Stein, Peter, “Sweden: From Capitalist Success to Welfare-State Sclerosis,” Policy Analysis, no. 160 (09 10, 1991).Google Scholar

14 Ibid., p. 7.

15 See Macfarlane, Alan, The Origins of English Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

16 Buchanan, , “Tacit Presuppositions of Political Economy.”Google Scholar

17 Schumpeter, J. A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942).Google Scholar

18 On this, see Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (London: Penguin Books, 1966), ch. 5.Google Scholar

19 I owe these data to Heller, M. and Nekrich, A., from their magnificent study Utopia in Power: A History of the USSR from 1917 to the Present (London: Hutchinson, 1986), ch. 1.Google Scholar

20 See Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, Rebuilding Russia (London: Harvill, 1991), pp. 29–33.Google Scholar

21 I develop this point further in The Strange Death of Perestroika, p. 32et seq.Google Scholar

22 I owe the expression “chaos of nations” to Lellouche, Pierre's superb book Le nouveau monde de l'ordre de Yalta au chaos des nations (Paris: Gasset, 1992)Google Scholar. Lellouche is foreign policy adviser to J. Chirac, leader of the Gaullist Opposition in France.