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By Root 1510 0

” in which flexibility and adaptability to local conditions are favored over the formulaic applications of abstract constitutional principles.27 However, while he regrets the passing of spontaneous local movements like Solidarity and Civic Forum, he still believes civil society can be established top-down by appropriate if supple and deliberate constitutional innovation, slighting the need to establish a bottom-up foundation in schools, voluntary associations, foundations, and other communal institutions that might in turn support a democratic constitutional edifice. Westerners either regret the absence of or simply ignore civil society in Russia, oblivious to the proliferating non governmental organizations that have sprung up and constitute the glimmering of a new post-Soviet “third sector.”

The media have focused on the explosive relationship between President Yeltsin’s reform-minded executive and the nationalist-conservative-Communist parliament: how would interested observers know then that dozens of nonprofits now dot the landscape and problematize the bipolarity of party rivals? These nonprofits include not only well-publicized foreign ventures like Big Brother/Big Sister but (to name only a few) such domestic institutions as the Rainbow Pedagogical Association, the Man’s Soul Charitable Foundation, the all-Russia Foundation for Social and Legal Protection of the Disabled, the Social Ecological Union, the International Bank of Ideas, the Christian Mercy Charitable Society, the Foundation for International Diplomacy and Cooperation, ANIKA (the Association of Civilian Women in the Military Establishment), the Russian Human Rights Association “Fathers and Sons,” the Independent Women’s Forum, the Association of Parents of Deaf Children, the Social Development Charitable Center and Interlegal: An International Foundation for Political and Legal Studies.28

The emergence in Russia of this new nongovernmental infrastructure suggests that local organization and parochial community are capable of generating not just local Jihad but new local forms of civil society. However, such developments do not happen spontaneously. Left to its own devices, Jihad neither generates its own democracy nor permits others to democratize it merely by importing the constitutional mechanisms devised by others over many centuries in nation-states with long-standing and historically well-developed civil societies. On the contrary, it tends to undermine the fledgling institutions of the young civil society Russia has just begun to nurture.

16

Wild Capitalism vs. Democracy

AWKWARD AS IT may be to tease democratic potentialities out of the debris of nation-states left behind by Jihad, it is still more difficult to grasp how democracy is to be won by campaigning single-mindedly for the liberated markets of McWorld, what Solzhenitsyn aptly has called “savage capitalism.” For markets do not appear in any obvious way to be ideal instruments for the regulation and control of public goods, and would-be democrats who look to them as a source of regulatory norms and democratic values would at first glance seem to have lost their marbles. Historian John Pocock asks “whether the subordination of the sovereign community of citizens to the international operation of post-industrial market forces” is a “good or bad step in the architecture of a post-modern politics.”1 My answer here is: bad. No, not bad, disastrous.

This is not to suggest that market forces and the ideology of libertarianism are not intellectually in fashion among postindustrial postmoderns or that they do not serve long-term productivity and wealth creation. Yet as advanced by pre-postmoderns such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the laissez-faire ideology assumes an endless “battle between collectivism and individualism” in which “any expansion of government,” whether by a Stalinist autocracy or a democratic town, is “collectivist” and thus, a priori, an assault on liberty.2 Government, including democratic government, is in this view always suspect, whereas markets are always