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By Root 1451 0

ever be imagined? Even if we could overcome our political diffidence, which mechanisms might afford us the chance as citizens to undo the inadvertent evils of global markets? The eclipse of the national “we” in the shadows of both Jihad and McWorld is trouble enough. Now we face their consequences in the absence of any global civic “we,” prepared to act beyond national boundaries. When the only transnational “we” available has to be drawn from anarchic congeries of greedy “me’s,” the market ultimately fails on its own terms. We get the goods but not the lives we want; prosperity for some, but despair for many and dignity for none. McWorld’s twenty-six thousand or more international nongovernmental associations are no match for its Fortune’s top five hundred multinational corporations. Cartels show little hospitality to citizens. McWorld is not and cannot be self-regulating. Nor is it likely to produce the kinds of democratic civic bodies it needs to stay in business. This is McWorld’s paradox. It cannot survive the world it inevitably tends to create if not countered by civic and democratic forces it inevitably tends to undermine.

Now these defects may not be defects at all by the standard of macroeconomics.27 They are only defects by the standards of politics. They become the defects of markets, however, when macroeconomics and markets are allowed to usurp the role of politics. The disastrous consequences that follow from patterning political reforms on macroeconomic theories are patently visible in countries throughout Latin America and Africa where “as the private sphere flourishes … the public sphere crumbles.” To Guillermo O’Donnell, a leading Latin American political scientist, the matter is simple: “privatization is not democratization.”28 Period.

I cannot begin to do justice to the havoc wrought by the attempt to impose an economic solution to the problems of democracy on the world’s developing regions, but I do want to offer brief portraits of two post-Communist lands where—in confounding privatization with democratization—wild capitalism has become the primary arbiter of civic values for the last five years and where as a consequence an older democracy (in the newly unified Germany) and a new would-be democracy (in old Russia) are each facing hard challenges to their democratic aspirations.

17

Capitalism vs. Democracy in Russia

THERE IS AMPLE empirical evidence to justify the shrill criticism by observers like Solzhenitsyn of Russia’s experiment with overnight democratization via capitalism-in-a-hurry. There are few participants in the process who are not today deeply worried about the impact of “shock therapy” capitalism both on Russia’s constitution—“a document of very limited legitimacy, and thus authority”1—as well as on the future of Russian democracy, “which has never been more uncertain.”2 John H. Fairbanks, Jr., believes that “many of the preconditions of fascism are now or will soon be present in Russia: hyperinflation, mass unemployment, seething status resentments, disillusion with democracy, a society that is ‘De-Christianized’ but still craves ‘spirituality,’ bitter border conflicts, constant fighting waged not by state armies but by freikorps-like volunteer groups and residual socialist and nationalist feelings.”3 Not every observer is so dramatic, but even sober economists such as Padma Desai have concluded that the shock strategy “hasn’t worked—and won’t.”4 He estimated a decline in Russian GNP of 19 percent and a further fall of 11 percent in 1993, along with inflation of 2,500 percent in 1992 and a continuing inflation thereafter of 25 percent a month. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, even the economies that have been advertised as “successful” have nonetheless sustained a radical decline in industrial output (over 50 percent in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia [similar to Russia], and more than 75 percent in Bulgaria), and a costly surge in retail prices, continuing inflation, and unemployment between 10 and 20 percent in nations that had none.

In Russia itself where advisors