Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [146]
This looks like Jihad by default. Limonov worries that as “69 years of party dictatorship has discredited communism,” so “Yeltsin has discredited Western democracy. Democracy must not be allowed to violate people.” When cosmopolitans begin to believe democracy is the demon, and when Yeltsin’s own new postreform Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin insists “the period of market romanticism is over … the mechanical transfer of Western economic methods to Russian soil has done more harm than good,” capitalism has exacted a very high price.40 Perhaps that is why even Boris Yeltsin has asserted that “Russia is simply not suited for [capitalism]. Russia is a unique country. It will not be socialist or capitalist.”41
The story, however, is not over, and the question is not whether Russia will be socialist or capitalist but whether it will be democratic. So dismal have Russian fortunes become, that some supposedly sympathetic observers are suggesting that the de facto sovereignty of crime over government and market be made de jure! Michael Scammell, professor of Russian literature at Cornell University, scolds us for being “squeamish” about “the decline or collapse of publishing houses, journals, theater and artists clubs and the impoverishment of academic institutions, as state subsidies are reduced or withdrawn,” for such institutions were overbloated in Soviet times. We should not shrink from what after all is only an echo of the “rough and tumble of America a century ago,” with a “new class of businessmen, entrepreneurs and adventurers answerable to no authority but themselves” running the show for the benefit of all. To Scammell, “the existence of a mafia is an unmistakable barometer of the degree of democratization of a given society When the mafia goes, so will Russia’s new found freedom.”42 In a similar vein, Nikolai Zlobin has argued that criminals of the higher sort in Russia along “with corrupt officials who are genuinely interested in evolution towards democracy and a free market economy …” with whom they are in league, cannot be said to be “interested in haphazard plundering of their country. Rather, they want to create an organized system from which they can control events and thus be in a strong position in the long run.” Zlobin concludes that since “in many ways control in Russia has already shifted to the new criminal network, which has replaced the old communist structure” and since “after a transition … they would presumably have less and less need for violent tactics and more investment in controlling anarchy,” one might as well make a virtue of necessity and let the mafia rule.43 There is no need to choose between the mafia and democracy or the mafia and the free market: the mafia is the free market. The mafia is democracy.44
Fortunately, neither McWorld nor its fellow-traveling criminals are the only forces at work in the new Russia. There are other important factors, including the emerging outline of a new civil society and civic infrastructure focusing on associations that belong neither to the state nor to the marketplace; a young professional class of academics, lawyers, and civic professionals ded icated to civil society and the rule of law; a growing interest in a “third sector” that cannot be folded into capitalism or state socialism; a concern for constitutional issues that go beyond politics; and a growing sense of the need to support the legislature (even when it is in the “wrong” hands) against the arbitrary prerogatives of the executive (even when it is occupied by Westernizing market enthusiasts).
In his official address to the Federal Assembly in 1994, under