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By Root 1506 0

a section entitled “The Person in a Democratic State” and in a subsection called “State Support for the Institutions of a Civil Society,” Boris Yeltsin actually uttered these words—more important than anything else he has said about democracy: “Without a developed civil society state power inevitably takes on a despotic, totalitarian character. Only owing to a civil society is this power subject to serving the individual and becomes a protecting mechanism for freedom.”45 With such sentiments on the official record, and institutions that embody them in the making, it would be a self-fulfilling error to write off Russia as a potential home for democracy. But as the evidence assembled here suggests, it would also be an error to think that markets alone, especially as advanced by the aggressive Western investors who profit from them, offer a shred of real support for such civic institutions or the democracy at which they aim.

Stephen Cohen, one of the more astute observers of the new Russia and a scholar singularly unimpressed by the argument for an economistic road to democracy, wonders whether there is actually more or less democracy in the new Russia. He worries that Yeltsin’s assault on the White House and his penchant for ruling by ukase—the executive decrees commissars and czars alike once employed to circumvent their own popularly elected peoples’ assemblies and dumas—reinforce an all-too-Russian tendency to exalt executive power at the expense of the legislature, which is always democracy’s primary residence even when we dislike the occupants elected to inhabit it. He poses the crucial and quite nearly taboo question: “Should everything created during the Soviet period be rejected as criminal or unworthy, and therefore everything built from scratch?” which, of course, is pregnant with an answer in the negative.46

By marking the years of Bolshevism “off limits,” the Russians and their friends have left them with a grim choice between the skulking Slavophile nationalism shrouded in ancient mists that proclaims “Vsegda Rossia!” (always Russia) and the new slogan plastered all over Moscow following “Cokefest ’94” celebrating the opening of the first Coca-Cola bottling plant that proclaims “Vsegda Coke!” (always Coke!). That, of course, is precisely the joke—an impossible choice between Jihad and McWorld, which if Russia is to survive as a democracy it must elude.

The market in theory may or may not be free. The market in practice, at least in one nation trying to escape the shadows of Bolshevism overturned, has been less a path to freedom than a road to new and subtle forms of dependency. The same tune, sung in a different key, can be heard if we listen in on the story of East Germany’s “integration” into a reunified “democratic” Germany.

18

The Colonization of East Germany

by McWorld

IN THE MONTHS preceding the demolition of the Wall in Berlin as well as the abrupt collapse of the government whose despotism the wall symbolized, a surprising collection of East German intellectuals, students, religious leaders, and even some workers—some but by no means all of them dissidents—collaborated to establish a loose opposition group to the crumbling rule of the German Democratic Republic called Neues Forum. The group’s signature was a courageous opposition to “people’s democracy.” Bertolt Brecht once said in his sly fashion that to the Communist Party democracy meant it was time to dissolve the people and elect a new one. The dissidents hoped to put the relationship right again, which did not, however, mean simply importing institutions from the West. Tied to its bold dissent was an equally firm skepticism about facile Western alternatives. Its objective was a novel civic order in which certain of social democracy’s unrealized ideals might be rescued from the Stalinism of the failing regime and grafted onto a genuinely open civil society based on the not always fully realized ideals of the West. Under its new civic forum name, the group not only led (though by no means constituted by itself) a popular movement that