Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  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journals, theater and artists clubs and the impoverishment of academic institutions, as state subsidies are reduced or withdrawn,” for such institutions were overbloated in Soviet times.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 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 did not so much overthrow the East German Communist regime as orchestrate its spontaneous collapse. Simultaneously, and perhaps more significantly, it strove as it did so to cultivate an embryonic new way for East Germany in which deliberative assemblies, local media, populist broadsides, a resuscitated civil society and an active intelligentsia trying (if not always succeeding) to cooperate with industrial workers, would establish a democratic society with a distinctive leftist German flavor. Reunification would have to wait until East Germany could offer a more equal partnership and insist on its own distinctive democratic institutions.

  There is no reason to glamorize Neues Forum. It had serious flaws, among them a typically intellectual underappreciation of the yearning of East Germans for the material goods of the West that were being advertised as the benefits of instant reunification. It also suffered from a romanticized view of the working class that never fully shared important aspects of its program, and a deadly naïveté about the power of what was the German version of McWorld: extremely well-oiled West German political parties, powerful German and international media corporations, eager bankers and managers to whom the East was the equivalent of what centuries ago would have been a newfound lost continent, and opinion makers and mind menders capable of packaging the ambitions of all the others in the seductive wrappings of market democracy.

  What followed was the king of all no contests. The Wall came down on November 9, 1989: only four months later, on March 18, 1990, a coalition of conservati
ve West German political parties led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats rolled to a victory so complete that the Social Democrats—projected as winners just a few months earlier but as things turned out far too cautious about reunification—were soundly thrashed, securing only 22 percent of the vote.1 More significantly, the remnants of Neues Forum had formed a coalition under the banner “Alliance 90” with other indigenous democratic and Green groups including Democracy Now and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights organized by former dissident Marxist Robert Havemann. But Alliance 90 had stubbornly refused to constitute itself as a conventional political party, and it captured less than 5 percent of the vote.

  In retrospect, it is clear the outcome was never in doubt: Alliance 90 was selling a difficult and demanding Third Way, an alternative to capitalist consumerism and Communist dictatorship that would preserve an East German democratic identity. Kohl’s Christian Democrats were giving away beer, bananas, and bratwurst at political rallies promising instant reunification and instant gratification. As Neues Forum leader Jens Reich put it, “The West German hippopotamus trampled the tender shoots of East German democracy.” Another disillusioned voter said: “All my life I dreamed of the day when the wall would come down, but the minute they opened it, I knew the revolution was over.”2 In Berlin’s daily newspaper, the Tageszeitung, the editor lamented, “The Germans are succeeding in turning a great historical opportunity into an experience of hopelessness, fear and deprivation.”3 Who, he wondered, would pay for the fiasco?

  More or less everyone. For what followed was a victory neither for the vanquished Neues Forum democrats nor for the lumbering hippopotamus of western German market capitalism. Reunification was embarked upon so precipitously that before anyone could blink, the West had swallowed up the East whole. Five years later, Germany still suffers from chronic economic indigestion. At the same time, a series of deep cleansings and wholesale scourings aimed at purifying ex—German Democratic Republic universities, courts, and the civil service of all Communist taint were carried out with a punitive thoroughness that made the de-Nazification program after World War II look like a sponge bath. Had cooperators with Hitler’s regime been rooted out with the same efficiency as cooperators with and fellow travelers of the German Democratic Republic’s regime, postwar Germany would have been stripped of its professional and business classes altogether.4 Had Germany done without such servants, it would have had to import juridical, political, and managerial cadres from abroad, especially since most of the antifascist Germans who had combatted Hitler and might have constituted an untainted cohort for the postwar West German government had joined the new Communist regime in the East—the regime whose children and grandchildren are being exiled from their posts today.5

  East Germany also underwent the economic acid bath of privatization, which is why with Russia it offers important lessons about the shock therapy’s destabilizing impact. Under the direction of a specially constituted trust agency (Treuhandanstalt), West Germany radically trimmed down or closed much of East Germany’s industrial plant—a radical deindustrialization that eventually cost more than 3 million out of the 4.5 million jobs that had existed in the German Democratic Republic. Women who had come to expect equal treatment and equal pay as laborers and special consideration as mothers under communism (which for all its tyranny did manage to make good on a few of its boasts) found themselves at the mercy of a market that had no particular interest in gender equality.

  By the time it closes down its operations sometime in 1995, Treuhandanstalt will have sold or liquidated close to fifteen thousand companies, including all of East Germany’s top newspapers and magazines, taken over by their western competitors and turned into outlets for West German—style journalism and opinion. Only a few properties remain on the block, including the Saxony town of Amerika (population one hundred), which Treuhand—clearly conscious of the theme-parking potential of McWorld—is pushing as a perfect site for a Wild West Park. The buyers for nearly all of East Germany’s industrial plant were almost exclusively from western Germany or abroad and will pay more than $122 billion for their new properties, but Treuhand had $217 billion in costs, leaving the taxpayers of Germany with an enormous debt.6 Some estimate that the deficit will soar to $275 billion before privatization is finished.7 That, along with the socially destabilizing job deficit, is likely to further inflame the politics of resentment that has already turned East against West, young against old, and German against foreign worker in the new unified Germany.8

  Unified Germany’s tax system actually discriminates against the five eastern Laender whose municipalities get only 85 percent of what comparable districts in the west receive. Under federal guidelines, the western Laender can actually prevent eastern Laender from sharing in redistributed state revenues.9 This sounds like a German version of Reich’s middle-class politics of secession, where the public sector is left bankrupt by the withdrawal of the wealthy from civic responsibility.

  Given this somber record, you did not have to be an ex-Communist to agree with the claim of the Party for Democratic Socialism that “Never in peacetime has so much social wealth been destroyed.” Enough Germans agreed to propel this relaunched East German Communist Party to a surprising showing in the German local elections in 1994, when 40 percent of East Berlin voters saw and voted Red and a Communist, Horst-Dieter Brahmig, was elected mayor of Hoyerswerda against the combined forces of all the other parties.10

  Two years before these startling elections results, many non-Communists had joined with ex-Communists to form a Committee for Fairness, whose platform proclaimed: “The destruction of our industry and agriculture, mass unemployment, unbearable rent increases, unfairly low wages, the closing of social, scientific, cultural and athletic organizations, the selling off of what was once ‘people’s’ property, rejection of our right to occupy apartments, houses and land and the demoralization of people in the East, especially women, have destroyed many hopes that were raised by German unification.”11 Although the committee included Democratic Socialists (former Communists) like Gregor Gysi, it also featured Christian Democratic leader Peterm Diestel, former mayor of West Berlin Heinrich Labertz, and Berlin Tageszeitung editor Michael Sontheimer, as well as such former East German dissidents as writer Stefan Heym and rock singer Tamara Danz.12 Artist Barbel Bohley, called the “mother of revolution” at the time of the collapse of the East German regime, did not join the committee but still protested: “For a half century we have not been allowed to decide for ourselves what we want. In the old days whenever we asked why things had to be done a certain way, we were told ‘Because that’s the way they are done in the glorious Soviet state.’ Now, since reunification, we’re told that we have to do everything the way it was done in West Germany.”13

  East Germans who clambered over the wall in the heady days of 1989 now stay in East Berlin in the neighborhoods where the Western bistros and boutiques have not yet signed leases. There the old working class bars and groceries remain largely unchanged, except for the gambling machines near the doors and the too expensive Western goods that are gradually driving cheaper local products off the shelves. As has happened elsewhere in the land of McWorld where the expansion of the private sector has drained political support for the public sector, public monies are not available for projects of real reunification. The great empty space at Potsdamerplatz that once anchored the Wall and its shooting zones near the Brandenburger Tor has been turned over to private multinationals like Sony and Mercedes-Benz for purely commercial exploitation and development, public uses shoved aside. Taxi drivers talk about a new “Mauer im Kopf” (a wall inside people’s heads) that divides East and West more effectively (because without any visible coercion) than the physical wall ever did. Smug westerners boast they can “spot a former East German just by his or her gait,” and are buying up old two-cycle Trabent cars that look like toys for their nostalgia collections.14

  Nostalgia—renamed “ostalgia” (nostalgia for the
East)—has made a provocative comeback in the eastern part of Germany, as is evident in Frank Georgi’s nutty plan for an East German theme park (“Ossipark”). Many East Germans are feeling a kind of nationalist sentimentality about local goods, however shoddy when compared to their western counterparts; 80 percent claim to prefer traditional products. Beverages from Communist times like Club Cola and “Beer from Here” are taking on the products of McWorld’s behemoths, their ads proclaiming, “Hurrah, I’m still alive. Club Cola: Our Cola!” Shops in the East are featuring German Democratic “East-made” cigarettes (F-6’s) that retain their earlier packaging and taste formulas.15 Ironically, however, F-6 is owned by Philip Morris, one of McWorld’s giants anxious to compensate for the declining American market in tobacco. In a marketing memo for F-6 permeated by the commodification of identity politics, Philip Morris executives remind their employees that the brand is “a piece of East German cultural history and constitutes a meaningful part of the formation of identity.”16

  Even the “Jugendweihe” has made a comeback: this anticlerical rite of passage ceremony by which young Communist pioneers once celebrated their coming of age has been revived by popular demand. In the first half of 1994 over seventeen thousand fourteen-year-olds participated in the confirmation process. Against the trends elsewhere that permit Hollywood to drive local fare off the screens, East German movies like the 1973 Legend of Paul and Paula are being shown again. Much of this revivalist mentality represents a reaction to perceived Western arrogance akin to the resentment typical of Jihad’s angry tribes. A market research firm warned that “the picture that East Germans have of West Germans is so negative that the word disapproval really doesn’t describe it. Hatred would be more like it.”17 Is it really any surprise that in 1991 when the Frankfurter Allgemeine ran a now notorious survey asking which was the best form of government, while eight of ten West Germans answered democracy, only three of ten East Germans did so? A stunning 82 percent of the easterners said they regarded themselves as second-class citizens in their new democratic fatherland.