|
CounterPunch
August
26, 2002
Democracy and
the Future of
Emerging Market Liberalism
by Norman Madarasz
When Brazil received the largest IMF bailout in
history on August 9, the stock markets of the world rejoiced.
It was one of the few days of significant stock market growth
in weeks. Yet in the end, it seemed like a supernova. One last
rise flashed brightly before the onset of recession could no
longer be denied by any conscientious economist. At this point
it may also mark the end of IMF measures for effective monetary
management. Brazil's public debt has only risen with the loan,
even if the chance of defaulting on payment has subsided. Still,
less than a week after the bailout, in tune with media skepticism
on the loan as a way of wrangling with the up-coming Brazilian
elections, the country's currency, the real, was on the move
again.
The loan and the need for one have led
to a more insidious admission in the world's financial press.
It holds that market liberalism has failed in emerging countries.
With the disaster of Argentina and the looming cloud of Turkey
and Brazil, the Financial Times, New York Times and Wall Street
Journal have been reading the message on the bank slip. With
any deciphering it's always of interest to ask what technology
is being used. When we do, we come across analytical approaches
typical of a band of sore losing whiners, an unworthy posture
for the cream of market intellectuals.
Anatol Lieven and Amity Shlaes both write
on emerging markets for the Financial Times. He signals the "death-knell
of transitology", while she expresses faith in the dictum
that the freer the market, the greater the riches. The result
is the same in the end. Transitology exposes the constraints
of capitalist logic. As the financial crisis ripples out from
Market Central, America, the policy guidelines according to which
emerging markets might make the transition to market liberalism
have primarily benefited financiers, creditors and speculators
-- in two words, banks and their likes. The outcome, then, is
a period vulnerable to populist forces ready to pounce on the
market's heaving torso.
What these commentators fail to mention
is that a popular backlash is brewing not only against the free
market. It is spreading against those who have been prancing
about as free market democrats only to be pushing the interests
of oligarchs on stage right. The population's ire starts from
their own capitals. For good reason, it stretches all the way
to Washington/New York and Ottawa/Toronto. In its expression
lies sure proof that democracy of this kind, even more than market
liberalism, has turned into a fable. Then ask the question: are
there any other kinds of democracies?
For years now, market economists have
waxed triumphant on their earning ethics. The road to riches
is redeemed if it spans over one-person/one-vote balloting. What
democracy gains from this is the assurance of financial prosperity.
Even so, scurrying behind the scenes were quiet voices who noticed
that prosperity had absolutely nothing to do with democracy in
China, South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia. Those were the days
when the Asian tigers growled louder than anything heard from
the East since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The GDPs erupting from
the region until the late nineties were directly influenced by
state interventionist populism, with the helping hand of foreign
investors.
Let's not hastily forget either that
America's steady growth is largely due to a Keynesian closed
circle of continuous government contracts doled out to the largest
industries. Modern American capitalism works at the bottom and
middle. Its workers and small businesspeople are taxed heavily
for the privilege. At the top, it looks more like state intervention
on all fronts, including the tax schemes, and even at times the
bailouts.
Still we hear pundits like Ms Shlaes
enthusiastically quoting economists like Reuven Brenner to the
effect that to reap riches democracy must go "hand in hand
with the liberalization of financial markets, giving citizens
a stake in the system." (FT, August 1, 2002) Never mind
that reasoning of this type is commonly discredited as an explanation
for why communist democracies work only in theory only to turn
to terror in practice. It is just probabilistic folly to ever
believe that markets can be liberalized as fully as promises
of fairness require.
The type of development Brenner points
to is not supposed to sound like hope. But that's all it turns
out to be when denying the systemic flaw that keeps stabbing
international trade in the heart. Inasmuch as large owners of
natural resources are less willing to establish liberal economies,
not only do they go on to impede democracy, they actually produce
poverty. It's just weak analysis to insist that emerging markets
simply ought to get to some more democratic stage. Everyone has
heard over and over how trying it is to implement the democratic
process. Today's junctures clearly show that over the past thirty
years democracies have been torn from the revolutionary potential
through which the people's will takes shape. Which means that
democracies are only smokescreens for oligarchic rule.
Market liberalists are being voted out
of power in a succession of these peripheral states. Ever more
clever arguments are woven to justify failure of market liberalism
in emerging markets. Northern speculators on intellectual movements
are led to lament the passing of democracy in the poor nations.
Yet not one of them has brought the question back home to ask
what this pattern reflects of Northern democracies themselves.
Democracy worldwide is in a pitiful state.
Then again the minds of our thoughts, from Plato and Aristotle
to Marx and Foucault, including Adam Smith, have considered democracy
to enable the poorest form of governance. So chaotic is its organization
that it remains forever vulnerable to tyranny. Just have a look:
in the self-proclaimed greatest democracy in the world, barely
a half of Americans still turn out to vote. For over twenty years
now, American presidents have claimed to have won by landslide
victories, when a meager fifth is all they have reaped from the
tally. Nothing went as far as the recent Florida farce, though.
Whereas in Canada, with an eye keener
than former Nortel CEO John Roth for economic previsions, Prime
Minister Jean Chrtien called snapshot elections in 1999 only
two years after last being re-elected. He has now ruled the Canadian
"democracy" for a record of three consecutive terms,
close to over ten years. The only opposition the political system
is able to muster is some half-baked Christian fundamentalism
claiming it can better enforce democracy by imposing its rigid
moral code.
Never mind that most "democracies"
have long banished the possibility for rule longer than two terms.
Mr. Chretien like Blair, Jospin and Gore tried to take credit
for an economic boom that resulted largely from accounting trickery,
all legal in the finest print. Economics has become an offshoot
of thermodynamics, as what was thought to be growth turns out
to be expanding percentage mark bubbles. In 1999, Canadians,
who have a reputation worldwide for their high level of education,
believed Chretien's gambit and swept him back to power in another
"landslide" victory equal to some 33% of eligible voters.
After realizing they have a tyrant on their hands, Canadians,
like other Western democrats, could only mutter that at any rate
there was no real opposition to speak about which could replace
him. It starkly befuddles them to sight a real opposition fighting
hand-to-hand battles under the general banner of NGOs against
lobby groups and multilateral organizations. This opposition,
not being an accredited political party, of course has no legitimacy
in a democracy.
Not a bad picture of the current first
world of democracy. Meanwhile the elite press laments its defaulting
to no end in the developing world. Constraints on article length
and publication deadlines surely prevent financial journalists
from raising the stochastic eyebrow regarding their own backyards.
Does it lack legitimacy, then, to hold even the slightest suspicion
that the establishment press is subservient to the business interests
of the stockholders who own the newspapers they write for? Of
course it doesn't: freedom of expression is also firmly fit in
the Northern democracies. As a case in point, such freedom involves
detention without charge as common practice for alleged political
crimes - not to mention back alley cyber-garbage snooping in
library loans and bookstore accounts. Strapped to free markets,
democracy has indeed fostered a wealth of methods.
Surely, the state of democracies has
progressed. Their foremost achievement has been to cut the problem
of social and political instability. Social instability, that
scourge, is only what a country gets when masses of workers and
students head to the streets to drive a wedge between business
lobby groups and the governments of which the people are - or
are constitutionally meant to be - the actors and owners. But
for the North American mind, political instability in a democracy
is when the opposition party is obnoxiously active. If there
has been any progress in Western democracies since the 1970s,
it has been to rid access to the parliamentary and assembly systems
of the deeply-rooted reformist and green parties that are all
but "populist" in the sense the financial intellectual
elite is painting them to be.
Just consider that no self-proclaimed
or designated populist government has ever brought structural
change to the class structure on any significant scale in Western
democracies since perhaps FDR's. Who is the populist, after all?
Yet the golden-boy and girl intellectuals clamor on: popular
movements, demonstrations and calls for tax reform, banning tax
shelters, havens and cuts, making banks accountable for the corporate-sponsored
legal thievery from which they earn their bullions, taxing international
financial transactions and continuing the project of building
a free education system for all, with the wherewithal to endow
its teachers with the highest level of education -- all of these
in the eyes of market liberals are nothing but expressions of
populism. They reject demonstrations as legitimate expressions
of the political will. They acquiesce to mankind's destiny of
destroying its natural habitat. And, as these intellectuals themselves
follow leaders and gurus, so also must the population at large.
In the end, it's just a logical extension
of the American and Israeli settler myths. Since our people migrated
to these fair lands, so also must have the native Arabs and Indians.
Scientifically, this translates as the necessary migration of
the first nations - did I hear forced migration? - across the
landmass connecting Russia to Alaska some 11 000 years ago. In
modern political terms, it asserts that a republic always needs
a president.
What about democracy in Europe? The settlers
first hoisted their sails from there as they fled persecution
(at least sometimes) to find a new virgin land (never in fact).
France is the seat of the 1789 Revolution, as it is of the lesser
known ones of 1830, 1848, '48 again and 1871. Arisen from the
blood of the Marseillaise and Communards, it rules as a source
of political invention for the West. Where is it now? France
is caught between the victory of abstention-voting and the muting
of social democracy by right-centrist populism. Populism does
rule. It need not borrow the red banner to engrave its mark.
Though it does succeed well in erasing from public exposure what
cries out in the mind of the people: accountable national governance
to distribute wealth and end absurd privilege. But as mathematical
democrats like to recall, abstaining in politics counts even
less than in sex.
Backwards is the course Western democracies
have taken since the mid-1970s. The monarchist doctrines of 18th
century British parliamentarism have managed to maintain their
rule. To the margins of the political system, we had the chance
to experience political invention from 1917 to the late 1960s
and 1970s. Then, with the opposition sidelined, CEOs and market
advocates were able through the glitter of electrotechnological
advances to promise a society - a globe - of increased affluence
for the many. Emerging markets were set on the course to transitology.
As a religion, democracy may reign strong
and loud in the West, i.e. the North. But over the past thirty
years, from Chicago 1968 onward, significant opposition parties
- with perhaps the exception of the Bloc Quebecois in Canada,
but for other reasons - have been all but drawn under. As the
Washington Post pathetically displayed on August 19, the Democrats
are now "worried" that a war against Iraq "could
shift attention away from the economic issues that now dominate
their agenda." From rhetoric and action opposition parties
have been relegated to mood. And how they worry.
A democratic society is rarely threatened
from the outside. Its institutions grow vulnerable to the abuse
of power from within. Its monuments are attacked by the sons
and daughters it maimed and killed from without. But as the cloak
of national security tautens into the shield of civil negation
the political process ends up being held hostage from the population
at large. What then? Follow free market advocates, who claim
that capitalism is crisis, and utter that democracy equates fundamentally
with dysfunctionality?
OPEC and the 1973 oil crisis thirty years
down the line have fully finalized their explosive prophesy.
Democracy as defended by the "quasi-benevolent" corporations
of the steel and automotive industries yielded their role long
ago. The counter-enlightenment crusaders of the neo-con school
have longed to return to the principles of oligarchic rule hidden
in the history lesson on Athenian "democracy". If that
lesson's still taught, that is. It's the only democracy the past
really knew: a partial power-lust driven democracy that brought
its own glory to dust through continual warfare. As for modern
societies, none of them have either managed or wanted to go much
further. After all, full voting rights -- reserved to citizens,
naturally -- is only decades old.
As for the U.N. Human Development Report,
it's democracry's report card. Based on the democratic successes
of the West and Central Europe, it proves the theory wrong according
to which development has priority over democracy. One of the
co-authors of the report, Omar Noman, adds that "the best
recipe for stability and development is democracy." (Globe
and Mail, July 24) As self-certain as it may appear for the thriving
upper middle classes and their ideological media controllers,
the measure is consistently satisfied with the level achieved
by the West. It never once addresses whether the lack of economic
prosperity outside of the West, with some sparkling though rare
exceptions, is merely a matter of capital accumulation with or
without democratic success.
So it becomes the population more than
the pundit to spot failing democracies. Anatol Lieven may liken
Latin America in the 20th century to "a sick man on a bed,
continually changing his position in an effort to find relief
from his pain, and always finding only a temporary respite."
(FT, August 11) He still ends up blandishing the measures taken
by the North from keeping the populations from establishing the
systems they need and want. Argentina may be showing a political
vacuum, probably to the relief of the military and oligarchy.
Recall only for a second that, like Chile, in Argentina's recent
past the hole in a generation of slaughtered and tortured progressive
activists still emits moans of grief as its economy veers headless
into total collapse.
Democracy has progressed indeed, progressed
as its own alternative as past inventors of new political forms
have been silenced into oblivion. Tyranny is no longer needed
to appease the upper class. Democracy does just fine.
Norman Madarasz
is a Canadian philosopher. He welcomes comments at normanmadarasz@hotmail.com
Weekend Features
Susan Davis
Proverbial
Wisdom:
Of Clogs and Enron
Falk / Krieger
No War
Against Iraq
Ceylon Mooney
Fasting
for Iraq
Jonathon Wright
Police
Brutality in Atlanta
Ralph Nader
Congress's
Pay Raise Scam
Jeffrey St. Clair
Chainsaw
George
Alexander Cockburn
Alterman
Cheapens Holocaust
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
New Print
Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- War Talk As White Noise:
Anything to Get Harken and Halliburton
Out of the Headlines;
- First Hilliard, Then
McKinney: Jewish
Groups Target Blacks Brave Enough to Talk About Justice in the
Middle East; Intimidation
is the Name of the Game; Smearing
"Insane" McKinney As Muslims' Pawn;
- The Missing Terrorist?
Calling Scotland
Yard: "Where's Atif?"
- They Never Booed Dylan!:
Tape Transcript Shows
Famed Newport Folkfest Dissing of Electric Dylan Not True. The Catcalls were for Peter
Yarrow!
- New Shame from the Liffey
Shrike
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
August 24
/ 25, 2002
Susan Davis
Proverbial
Wisdom:
Of Clogs and Enron
Falk / Krieger
No War
Against Iraq
Ceylon Mooney
Fasting
for Iraq
Jonathon
Wright
Police
Brutality in Atlanta
Ralph Nader
Congress's
Pay Raise Scam
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Chainsaw
George
Alexander
Cockburn
Alterman
Cheapens Holocaust
August 23,
2002
Dave Marsh
Selling
Out?
Anthony Gancarski
Super-Duper:
Oil, al-Qaeda and a West African Adventure
William Hughes
Lieberman's
Conflict
of Interest?
Kurt Nimmo
The Lapdog
Conversion of CNN:
They Didn't Want to "Criticize" a Popular War
Sean Donahue
Hardline
in Colombia
August 22,
2002
Sean Donahue
Hardline
in Colombia
Wayne Madsen
Crushing
Congressional Dissent: The Fall of Hilliard, Barr and McKinney
Gilad Atzmon
The Zionist
Lobby and
American Foreign Policy
Robert Johnson
Right
Wing Doves?
Alexander
Cockburn
Taking
Down McKinney
August 21,
2002
Gary Leupp
The Return
of Mani
Romi Mahajan
Bhopal
on $40 a Day
Jerre Skog
Bush and
Europe:
Fun, Profit & Betrayal
Tom Crumpacker
The
Politics of the Cuba Embargo
August 20,
2002
Kathleen
Christison
Israeli
Tilt: the NYT
and Palestine
August 14
/ 19, 2002
Susan Davis
Played
Out: a Journey to Central City, Colorado
CounterPunch
Staff
Our Favorite
Films
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Usonian
Utopia's:
Frank Lloyd Wright, Working Class Housing and the FBI
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon and the Iron Wall
Uri Avnery
A Phone
Call from Hell
Wendy Brinker
Racism
is Alive and Well in the South Carolina Death House
Hamit Dardagan
The
Unbearable Lightness of Bombing
Ahmad Faruqui
The Legacy
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Philip Farruggio
Leading
by Example
Anthony Gancarski
Union
Jackass: Richard Perle's UK Charm Offensive
Jeff Halper
Fortress
Israel: the Message of the Bulldozer
Robert Jensen
Our Failures
are Borne by the Palestinians
Gary Leupp
An Open
Letter to Bruce Springsteen about Bush's War on Terrorism
Dave Marsh
Sing a
Simple Song
Rashmi Mayur
To Johannesburg
in Search of Hope
Steve Perry
Another Fine Mess:
Martha Stewart and Paul Wellstone
Anis Shivani
What's
Next...Concentration Camps?
Edward Said
Punishment
by Detail
Jeff Taylor
Paul Wellstone's
Legacy
August 10/11,
2002
Walt Brasch
The Bush
2 Legacy...So Far
August 9,
2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Corporate
Crime:
More Shareholder Power
Not the Solution
Ansar Ahmed
The Waning
of the
Pax Americana
Alexander
Cockburn
War,
the Military and the Hunt for the "Violence Gene"
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|