Freedom after the cold war

...Czechoslovakia...

...There is so much to praise, so much of which to be proud...

...Throughout history, social organization has been based on the assumption that most people need to be ruled and only a few are capable of ruling...

...After four decades of autocratic rule, Central Europeans go on distrusting the government while not even suspecting the powerful concerns that are muscling in...

...The consolidation of freedom demands a conception of ownership as stewardship, as an obligation to love and care for what we claim to own...

...Weak local governments trying to cope with powerful international forces may be the most basic structural problem of the post-cold war era in Central Europe...

...This is why fostering the growth of civil society is one of our most urgent tasks...

...As the American experience shows, democracy must grow from below, from the grass roots...

...Only very gradually and still not out loud are we beginning to admit to ourselves the ambiguity of ownership that the West knows only too well...

...That is an ideal often derided, and it is vulnerable to ridicule...

...A private owner cares as an anonymous manager does not...

...Consolidating freedom cannot mean alternating a robber baron phase and a "Shining Path" phase, alternately enshrining property as a sacred right and condemning it as theft—while continuing to operate in both phases with the same primitive conception of property as domination, the right to use or abuse, alienate or destroy...

...A government that has just replaced Karl Marx with Adam Smith might well consider an atomized aggregate of citizens preferable to a civil society...

...As this story goes, all was well with the world as long as private property owners pursued their individual goals, guided, as if by an invisible hand, to promote the common good...

...Masaryk is often quoted as saying that "Democracy is discussion...

...To most of them, even traffic regulations seemed "undemocratic," though they accepted them as necessary...

...I would suggest a third trait of democratic coexistence: the conviction that the task of government is not just to advance our individual or collective self-interest but to tame the strong and protect the weak...

...That is not a matter of "direct" as against "representative" democracy, but of civic maturity and immaturity...

...The story of our youth had been about the revolt of the wretched of the earth ushering in a new age of social justice...

...If we abuse the earth and our fellow beings in the name of property rights, future idealists will take up the banner of the wretched of the earth, of the abused and the exploited, and launch humanity on another cycle of revolution and disillusion...

...Given our experience with central planning, the government is dogmatically committed to removing all fetters on the workings of the invisible hand...

...That, again, is a radical reversal of what humankind has taken for granted...

...Take an example: an average Czech worker today earns about six thousand crowns a month...

...But neither can they form the basis of a democratic society...

...I shall long remember the scene, shortly after the end of communist rule, of a Czechoslovak policeman parking his ancient Skoda and searching his pockets for a coin so he could call his police station from a pay phone—which, as it turned out, was out of order...

...the world, and they that dwell therein...

...The problem comes when we try to identify the players: the strong who need to be tamed and the weak who need to be protected...

...However, after the experience of communism, most Czechs and Slovaks find it hard to expect anything positive from the government...

...That is the real story: the success of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak Republics, in rebuilding free and democratic societies...

...Yes, there were such problems as the depression and the world war, but those were only minor blemishes...

...Wholly legitimately, their concern was to make profits...

...That story was utterly discredited by the brutality and sleaziness of "actually existing socialism...

...Consolidating freedom means learning the habits of self-confidence and responsibility...

...Through no fault of their own, Czech managers were not in the same league...

...This is not simply a matter of some people being more affluent than others...

...It is understandable, but the long-range results can only be destructive...

...Without private initiative, the collectivized economy collapsed...

...Survivors of the Soviet era accept it gladly, since for decades government had been the sole threat to freedom...

...Maturity grows out of freedom and responsibility, the two things totalitarian rulers deny their subjects...

...Under Masaryk's presidency, Czechoslovakia between the wars was genuinely a bulwark of freedom and a refuge for the persecuted in a troubled Europe...

...Throughout history, governments have been instruments of the powerful for keeping the weak in their place...

...Paternalism, whether that of a father or of a ruler, inevitably encourages immaturity...

...The obstacles to consolidating democracy are not only structural but also psychological and sociological...

...Today we are told that privatization will protect the common good...

...People for whom, for decades, "free" meant no more than "pro-American" and "socialist" was a code word for "pro-Russian" seldom have a clear idea of what freedom and democracy might mean...

...Now, if only we privatize radically enough, the market will cure all our ills and all will be well once more...

...We see the most ironic and tragic metaphor of our condition when the government tames the environmental movement in behalf of an international cement concern or a domestic power monopoly—and all that to the applause of the very people whose land and lungs will be devastated by strip mining, massive dams, and car exhausts...

...For some it meant having a car, a home, and a secure position...

...If, on the other hand, the substance of democracy were anarchy, then democracy would mean a permanent revolt against the reality principle, SPRING • 1997 • 23 Politics Abroad condemned to an adolescent futility...

...Nor were the multinational corporations moving into the vacuum any less powerful...

...not all owners are private individuals bonded to their property by love and labor...

...A second problem is closely related—the influx of capital, in the form of aid and investment, encouraging a polarization of society...

...Americans learn democracy in their clubs, their town meetings, their churches—it would be difficult to grow up in America and not learn the rudiments of Robert's Rules of Order...

...Leninism thrived on warlike rhetoric and warlike thought...

...A society committed to seeking noncoercive, consensual solutions, to fostering civic maturity and to taming the powerful and protecting the weak, however short it may be of the goal, is on the way to consolidating freedom...

...Once private owners replace state agencies, we will not need rules for the exercise of ownership...

...A town meeting can become tyrannical, and representative government can be thoroughly democratic: it depends on whether the community is mature enough to respect the common good or whether it has to be coerced into it...

...There was simply no contest...

...In the name of economic growth, governments throughout the former Soviet empire are once more becoming the instrument of the powerful, keeping the weak in their place...

...Yet when in 1994 pollsters inquired into the meaning of democracy in the popular mind, more than 60 percent of the respondents in the Czech lands identified democracy with the absence of constraints on individual actions...

...The principle of taming the strong and protecting the poor is familiar enough...

...Democracy seems to represent something between omnipotence and egoism, freed of all reality constraints...

...Western governments, reflecting their own experience, tend to be generous with advice for scaling down governments...

...Downsizing" is the word of the day...

...Mine is the one country in the former Soviet bloc that had both a democratic tradition and practical experience with modern democracy...

...The communist experiment with abolishing private interest failed miserably...

...For that matter, never mind that police are being killed: we have a "right" to sell armor-piercing bullets...

...There is a third structural reason why the consolidation of freedom in Central Europe is such a daunting challenge: the breakdown of civil society...

...If freedom is to survive, we have few tasks as urgent as forging a conception of ownership as neither a theft nor a right, but as a trust...

...Democracy is about seeking the broadest possible support for the most broadly acceptable solutions, not about enforcing the will of a momentary majority...

...It encourages corruption...

...Many of them assumed that their foreign partners would provide them with massive injections of capital and help them modernize so that they could compete with them in exports...

...The mood of the time, though, is the opposite...

...Klaus's government has vigorously blocked any laws that would give special status to non-profit organizations...

...That again is something difficult to present in the postcommunist world...

...Ordinary citizens can look only to corruption—or to emigration—to imitate the lifestyle that the affluent make fashionable...

...Never mind that people are being brutally exploited: we have a "right" to private property...

...The results were felt long before the fall of the old regime...

...I am also a philosopher...

...Decades of bondage inculcated habits of servility and irresponsibility...

...Other problems are conceptual...

...However, no matter how well intentioned, even if all of it were in the form of outright aid, a massive influx of capital will generate an artificially affluent stratum, in part composed of foreign workers, in part composed of locals parasitic on them, maintaining a living standard wholly discontinuous with the domestic economy...

...In a powerful emotional response to the communitarian experiment just ended, it is tempting to reject any and all limitations upon the exercise of ownership and to insist on "property rights" as the true meaning of freedom...

...In five short years, we have managed to nurture a new civic consciousness, to build the basic framework of democracy, to lay the foundations of a viable economy...

...Today the threat comes from a different quarter— from a government too weak to contend with the forces, benign or malevolent, that confront it...

...For that matter, all cold war thought did the same...

...Democracy is a revolt against this idea...

...Some of these problems are psychological...

...The affluent stratum absorbs a disproportionate share of incoming foreign capital and re-exports it by purchasing cars and status symbols such as trips abroad, leaving little to trickle down to the domestic economy...

...As for business, it did not figure in the equation at all...

...Future Czech parliamentarians, including T.G...

...To a Westerner, this might seem hopelessly naive...

...However, the will has to be there—and, for wholly understandable reasons, it is not...

...The Save the Children Federation is subject to the same brutal sales and property taxes as IBM...

...The difference is staggering—and destructive...

...In stronger, well-established countries, vigorous domestic industries can help balance multinational ones...

...As a Czech I would like to speak only of our successes—to play the role of the bard who sings the praises of the polis...

...The multinationals did not prove to be particularly vicious, but neither did they prove particularly benign...

...Even horseback riders could associate only as an equestrian section of the local Association for Cooperation with the Armed Forces...

...As the command economy destroyed all economic initiative, so the command society destroyed all social initiative...

...The powerful now were the monopolies left over from the old regime, the multinational corporations moving in with colonial arrogance, and the ruthless international mafias...

...Masaryk, one of the great philosophers of democracy, earned their spurs in the imperial Reichsrat, Austria's parliament...

...Elections can be no more than civil war fought by other means, a less bloody way of choosing a despot...

...It is the posture of cooperation rather than confrontation...

...Since coercion and shortages were endemic throughout our forty-two years of communism, such perceptions are not surprising...

...It is much more reasonable to expect the government to suppress SPRING • 1997 • 21 Politics Abroad organized crime and to set rules for doing business that will allow corporations to be profitable without being destructive...

...Or perhaps it is best expressed by those believers who say, "The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof...

...Suspecting Czech and Slovak society—with good reason—of loyalty to old habits and modes 22 • DISSENT Politics Abroad of thought, it systematically attempted to destroy all traditional bonds and associations...

...A basic tenet of MarxismLeninism as it was taught throughout the former Soviet empire was "thinking in terms of class war"—who will prevail, who will be defeated...

...It is the quality of daily life between elections that makes a community democratic...

...Democracy is not just a way of selecting leaders: it is a mode of life that grows out of a thousand individual initiatives...

...In light of the violence of the government's rhetoric against it, we tended to assume that it must be on our side, the side of the weak...

...The regime was paternalistic in the extreme, arrogating unto itself a total monopoly of responsibility and initiative...

...Yet humans, however callous and blind we might at times be, do have a conscience and are capable of recognizing the long-range damage that greed can do to our earth and to our future on it...

...The future of freedom, I suspect, depends on our ability to generate a conception of property that will be compatible with the common good and with the survival of the earth...

...Democracy requires at least a basic, broad equality, humans living in the same world...

...The task falls entirely on the government, which is woefully underequipped for dealing with it—and after the experience of the communist regimes, also loath to do so...

...Yet it is what the democracy of the Swiss community or the New England town meeting is all about...

...The story was drowned out all too soon by yet another story—this time about "democratic capitalism" triumphing over the totalitarian collectivism of the Evil Empire...

...The problem is that for forty-two years our rulers spoke of civic maturity but encouraged the precise opposite...

...Many more are absentees, many others are anonymous corporations whose investment decisions are governed by computers programmed solely with an eye to quarterly balance sheets...

...Worst of all, the polarization is difficult to integrate with democracy...

...In the postcommunist countries, however, there are no such domestic industries...

...It was only the Communists, interfering with private property and freedom of enterprise, who destroyed the idyll...

...Even before World War I, the western part of Austro-Hungary was recognizably democratic...

...Multiparty elections...

...That is the basis on which Central Europe's leaders are seeking to build democracy...

...Democracy is the audacious attempt to reverse this age-old equation...

...it is a matter of qualitative difference, of a radical discontinuity...

...Such capital, to be sure, is most welcome and sorely needed...

...But I am not only a Czech...

...A poorly paid one might earn as little as four thousand...

...For fortytwo years, the government was all-powerful: it held an effective monopoly on all economic and social initiative and wielded the means to enforce its will...

...The totalitarian mentality is one that sees the world in terms of friend or foe...

...Never mind that we are being poisoned by exhaust fumes: we have a "right" to drive a car...

...We have it ever before us: the tender restoration of state property by private owners, often working miracles of mighty effort with all the love long denied...

...However, to sustain the "entrepreneurial" lifestyle requires an income of fifty thousand or more...

...That breakdown is the product of conscious effort...

...We need to tell a different story, one of the earth as entrusted into our hands, of responsibility for the earth as a basic human trait...

...However, their crime brought its own punishment...

...A country like the Czech or Slovak Republic might well serve that purpose better as a source of cheap labor and a market for inferior products than as a strong competitor...

...It is, far more, a difference in the expectations that a society holds out for itself...

...To many of Central Europe's powerful figures, like the Czech Republic's prime minister, Vichy Klaus, the very term "civil society" is anathema...

...The negotiations between Skoda and Volkswagen are only the best known instance among many...

...Not democratization, but privatization and the abolition of all constraints on "property rights" are presented as the way to consolidate freedom...

...Central European governments today, still raw from years of communist egalitarianism, encourage polarization, praise affluence, and do nothing to prevent poverty...

...This is the story told by the current government of the Czech part of what was once Havel's...

...a very well-paid one, a physician or a university professor, might earn eight or even ten thousand...

...Then, when the command structure collapsed, what was left resembled Machiavelli's Italy or the modern state as Hegel imagined it: a mass of atomized individuals ruled by a central government...

...They may live in opposite sides of that world, the rich and the poor, but it needs to be recognizably the same world...

...They need not be coerced: if they want the Monadnock Visiting Nurse Service, they are mature enough to pay for it...

...Finally, there are structural problems, built into the situation of peoples living in the shadow of a great power, however freedom-loving and democratic those peoples might be...

...Yet a society with no constraints becomes a war of all against all...

...Democracy is the direct opposite of this mentality...

...Fundamentally, all was well...

...Consolidating freedom in Central Europe in the wake of the cold war means building governments that can cope with Mafias and multinationals, and that are willing to counter the inevitable polarization of society, preventing the impoverishment of the many and the bloating of the few...

...Perhaps this is best expressed by the Native Americans who say that the earth is not our own, that we have it on loan from our children...

...In the other half of the former Czechoslovakia, the consensus was even more striking: nearly 80 percent of the respondents identified democracy with consumer affluence...

...When this is the prevailing story, even speaking of a common good or of civil society becomes suspect...

...It would be unfair to expect a multinational corporation to function as a more affluent version of the Peace Corps—and unrealistic to expect organized crime to do so...

...The current experiment with abolishing all constraints on private interest promises to fail no less miserably and, given the ecological state of the earth, quite possibly with drastic and irreversible consequences...

...Just the opposite: it feared all citizen initiative...

...The massive influx of foreign capital makes that virtually impossible...

...The aim was to replace all independent social structures with vertical command structures, making sure that nothing could ever take place without a command being given...

...At its purest, it is the audacious belief that all humans are or can become capable of governing themselves...

...A sign of a mature democratic community is that a majority of 51 percent will refrain from carrying out its program if a minority of 49 percent is adamantly opposed to it...

...What are the problems of women and men trying to build free societies in the countries that inherited the democratic ideal but not a democratic reality after the end of the cold war...

...Others expressed strong agreement (or "mostly agreed") with the statement that democracy means that everything is available and people have enough money to buy it...

...Perhaps, though that is hardly enough...

...26 • DISSENT...

...Perhaps the most basic structural problem is simply the sheer, overwhelming disproportion of resources...

...The civil structure of our societies was devastated, our political structures perverted, our perceptions distorted, our economies in shambles...

...The weak in the postcommunist world do not wish to be protected, and the governments do not wish to protect them...

...Never mind that our streams and forests are being destroyed: we have a "right" to make a profit...

...A command democracy, though, is a contradiction in terms...

...It is a quest for consensus, respecting both the diversity of individuals and the good of the community...

...It is thinking in terms of partners in difference, seeking common solutions to common problems with mutual respect...

...An anonymous state enterprise, we are told, will clear-cut a forest or strip-mine away a village for a quick profit, while a private owner simply would not do that...

...The international drug cartels, veterans of Sicilian and Colombian drug wars, were moving in with supercharged Mercedeses, cellular phones, and tested managerial know-how...

...In that spirit, I want to examine the difficulties confronting democratization in the newly freed lands...

...If the substance of democracy were affluence, then the firm authoritarian hand of Asia's four tigers would represent the democratic ideal...

...A people that can rule itself need not be ruled...

...Consolidating freedom in the wake of the cold war may well mean first of all building up governments strong and competent enough—and willing—to stand up to the Mafias and the multinationals...

...How democratic a community will be between elections will depend on the civic maturity, the voluntary regard for public good, of all its citizens...

...Yet there is a vast difference in the quality of life among various countries, and it is not just a difference in levels of individual consumption...

...In Central Europe, hopelessly weak governments, often run by well-meaning amateurs, confront the immense power of multinational corporations and international mafias...

...Perhaps the most challenging aspect of consolidating freedom is the need for personal transformation, the task of building not a state but a community of mature citizens...

...Some might argue that in terms of the way I have defined democracy, there are no truly democratic societies in the world—at most, there are societies that select their rulers by popular election rather than by primogeniture, conspiracy, or civil war...

...In the Czech lands, it seems credible because it often is true of individual owners...

...It would take a brave person to hint that anonymous multinational corporations displace private shopkeepers at least as effectively as the communists ever did—or that the problem with the old regime was that it destroyed civil liberty, and only derivatively that it robbed people of their private property...

...The communist regime in Czechoslovakia, for all its rhetoric, was not at all socialist...

...For a shimmering moment it seemed that the new story would be the one told by \facial/ Havel—a story about love and truth triumphing over hatred and lies...

...Even planting a garden became "the battle of grain...

...Again, it is understandable...

...What does democracy mean...

...Quite simply, hardly anyone has a clear conception of just what democracy is supposed to mean...

...Old habits die hard, though...

...Philosophy since Socrates's time has played the role of the gadfly, consolidating freedom by pointing to its faults and flaws...

...There is a second trait crucial to the democracy in everyday life on which the consolidation of freedom depends...

...Not all owners love their propSPRING • 1997 • 25 Politics Abroad erty more than profit...

...Those were the ideals invoked by the reformers and the dissidents of the communist years, Vaclav Havel among them...

...A new age begins when a new story starts to take shape...

...24 • DISSENT Politics Abroad Then the powerful regime collapsed, replaced by a weak and hesitant government...

...And not only that: Americans also learn decency, habits of consideration and cooperation, and attitudes of respect through the daily functioning of their civil society...

...In a New Hampshire town meeting, citizens vote to tax themselves...

...The means available are many, from graduated income taxes to massive public housing construction to supporting public transportation and discouraging luxury automobiles...