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Nikolai Spassky,
D. Sc. (Political sciences), Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary THE DECLINE OF EUROPE AND PROSPECTS OF RUSSIA (Democracy - not the Aim, but a Means)
"Social paradise"
The 20th century Europe was the most advanced and comfortable region of all times and peoples. But it paid dearly for its mature civilization. The payment included two super-sanguinary revolutions -the French Revolution of 1783 and the Russian October Revolution of 1917, two world wars, several civil wars, including the Russian and Spanish wars, and communism, fascism and Nazism as experiments in social engineering.
After the end of World War II, which resulted, among other things, in the curtailment of the territory of Western Europe almost by half, the leaders of the West European ruling class have come together for some secret meeting where they decided that Europe would not survive another big war or revolution.
The above-mentioned leaders have drawn practical lessons from this fundamental conclusion. They set up NATO in order to accommodate the age-old antagonists, Germany and France by incorporating them both in the structures of this military-political alliance spearheaded against the U.S.S.R. Some time later the European community was formed, a real project of genius designed to seal the new Franco-German closeness through economic integration. In essence, Western Europe took a course to the creation of a socially-oriented state. On the example of the Soviet Union with its indisputable achievements in the protection of working people's rights, West European politicians began to introduce these rights and guarantees in
their own countries. The duration of workday was reduced everywhere, the right to strike was guaranteed, a decent minimal wage was introduced, unemployment benefits were noticeably increased, retirement age was lowered, and pensions were established at a level, which was enough for a decent life. In the most advanced countries workers were granted paid sick-leave, maternity leaves, child maintenance bonuses, and free medical aid. Subsidies for buying medicinal drugs were also introduced. The employer's right to fire a worker was radically reduced. The growth or labor productivity in Western Europe lagged behind the real incomes of the working people (wages plus privileges).
Parallel with these guarantees, the public and semi-public sector connected with them, that is, the state health service, state education and other services rendered by the state, broadened noticeably. Thus, the dream of the Russian proletariat - to live decently without great strain at work and without fear of being fired - became reality in Western Europe.
West European working people did not even realize that they owed all these benefits and rights of "socialist paradise" mainly to the Soviet Union, which, by the very fact of its existence, made the western ruling class agree to enormous concessions to working people, absolutely unthinkable before. Everything would have been perfectly all right, if not for a little trifle. Capitalism as a system functions through the drawing of profit. If there is no profit, the system begins to fail. However, profit cannot be drawn from the thin air. It appears in the process of the exploitation of hired labor. Consequently, inasmuch as the exploitation of West European working people in the new conditions have ceased to bring the desired profit, capitalism in the West was doomed to gradual systematic failure.
Using broad rights and under the protection of the trade unions of their countries, West European working people were working less and worse. Naturally, despite periodic complaints and spontaneous protest actions, they were quite satisfied with their life, perhaps, without luxury, but with reasonable comfort. In this respect it can be stated that the social experiment carried out by the founding fathers of modern Western Europe was crowned with success.
Meanwhile, the problem of the gradual reduction of the production potential of West European countries was gradually taking a turn for the worse due to the mass reduction of birth rate.
There is nothing surprising in this phenomenon. The growing prosperity, educational and cultural level and opportunities for rest and leisure, as a rule, lead to a drop in birth rate. This is quite natural. In our case there is another circumstance which has played a major role. To give birth to a child, to bring him up and educate is an enormously difficult and responsible work. And the main burden of it is on the mother's shoulders. While losing habits and skills of serious labor, the West European working classes have gradually been losing the desire to have children.
In other words, West European capitalism on the basis of its own labor resources could not ensure expanded reproduction and the drawing of profit.
Crisis
Beginning from the 1950s, West European countries began to import labor resources from their former colonies, and also from Turkey and Yugoslavia, on a growing scale Often migration flows completely changed their direction. In the 1950s - 1960s Italy supplied its redundant labor resources, whereas some time later it became a country of mass migration itself. After the falling down of the iron
curtain and the inclusion of the former Soviet bloc countries first in the European Union and then in Schengen, mass migration of labor resources from the east of Europe to the west began. Migration flows from China were added to the process.
The shrinking West European workforce moved to highly-paid, highly-protected and the most prestigious sectors of the economy. These losses were compensated at the expense of the inflow of labor resources from the south and from the east. Immigrants from countries which were not EU members worked at factories and plants, built houses, swept streets, and served public catering establishments. They did this for scanty remuneration and without the right to protest.
It would seem that West European capitalists have at long last solved the age-old dilemma of the capitalist system by having achieved the situation in which the wolves are full and the sheep are whole. Their own working people are satisfied and do not strike, and work is being done and profit made. Oh, sancta simpicitas!
It is not possible to preserve inner barriers and support isolated subsystems within the framework of one and the same system, sufficiently compact and open as the present West European democratic state, that is, one subsystem for one's own, and another for alien people, one for the citizens, and another for the immigrants.
Along with the creation of the legal foundations of a socially-oriented state in Western Europe a political and psychological superstructure adequate to it was created. If marginal non-systemic parties and sentiments are ignored, there has been an unprecedented restructuring of the political landscape. The left, or to be more exact, near-to-left ideas and sentiments have become prevalent. The doctrine of social responsibility and social justice has become the official slogan not only of traditional social-democratic parties and trade unions, but
also of political organizations which have traditionally been considered right-wing, for instance, the Christian democrats.
Social peace and tranquility have to be paid for. The West European societies have paid for the reality of social peace in life by the figment of social peace in the heads. Just to think of it... the values are widespread in Western Europe now, which used to be common on socialist propaganda some time ago. Everybody has the right to decent, worthy life, the socially unprotected and weak should be helped, the state should redistribute wealth from the rich and successful in favor of the weak and unsuccessful, etc. Naturally, the establishment and pubic support of these values evoke great admiration. However, the balance between the rights and obligations should be properly established and ensured, otherwise society ceases to function as it should.
Finally, immigrants themselves do not intend to reconcile with their downtrodden and inferior position. They have come to the West not in order to live better than at home in their own countries. They have come in order to live in the same way as the indigenous people live and enjoy similar social rights and guarantees.
The classics of Marxism were right when they pointed out that capitalism lived up to this day. For the period of life of a whole generation the system based on drawing the cheap labor resources from the south and the east brought superprofits to West European capitalists. But this system was doomed from the vary beginning. Gradually, immigrants increasingly gain the same volume of social rights and guarantees for themselves as the local population. Besides, they demand additional rights, just as any organized minority, primarily, the right to religious, cultural and everyday-life identity. And it turns out that modern democratic Britain, the homeland of the Magna Carta (1215) and the Habeas Corpus (1679), allows the use of the Sharia norms as a source of law.
The drawing of workforce en masse from poor countries helped West European states to cope with the deficit of labor resources, but it did not solve the main problem, namely, that of giving them agreeable wages and real rights so that working people would be satisfied, and at the same time to ensure competitiveness of production and gain the necessary profit. But our West European friends had one moiré trump card.
As is known, capital, just as the proletariat, has no old country. When capital cannot gain a high profit rate in the zone of its existence, it looks for other places of operation. That was a case of postwar Western Europe. Losing profit at home, its capital headed for other countries. First, to relatively civilized Latin America, then to Southeast Asian countries, and after the downfall of the Berlin Wall to East Europe, and lastly, naturally, to China and India. Capital has resorted to this well-tested means many times in its history. This time, too, this step has been quite effective.
Large-scale relatively modern industries have been developed in Latin America and Asia. Given cheap workforce and close proximity of natural resources West European capital began to gain super-profits. Industrial goods produced there were sold all over the world, including the historical Motherland, and filling also the capacious markets of Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, India, China, and other giants of the Third World. It would seem all were quite satisfied and happy.
But tough luck! The goods produced in the Third World, be it branches and affiliations of West European companies or industries created by Chinese themselves with the help of copied western technologies, when they get to Western Europe, they got the upper hand easily over similar goods produced in Western Europe itself. Be it cars, vacuum cleaners, TV sets, computers, housewares, toys, or clothing.
Indeed, the goods produced in Western Europe are of a better quality, but due to the higher cost of workforce and the bureaucratic character of the labor market these goods are much more expensive than their Chinese analogues, although the latter are somewhat inferior in quality, but quite acceptable. Thus, the West European producer loses to its competitors from the Third World on its own ground.
We observe, for the umpteenth time already, the amazing bifurcation of proletarian consciousness. On the one hand, West European working people protest and organize manifestations demanding that their governments protect the local producer from dishonest competition on the part of China. But on the other, coming to shops and supermarkets the very same working people purchase Chinese goods because they are cheaper. It would seem that if one fine day all people stop buying Chinese goods and begin to purchase one's own, good-quality and nice-looking goods produced in their own country with due observance of numerous laws on labor and nature protection, and the problem of competition would be solved once and for all. But this does not happen because the purse has no home country either. Thus, the operation on transferring industries from Western Europe to the Third World initially planned with a view to supporting West European business and helping it gain a high profit rate collapses before our very eyes.
West European governments and big entrepreneurs have completely lost control over the process, to which they largely contributed for several decades already. Powerful industry which have taken shape in China, India, Turkey and other eastern and southern countries has created insurmountable competition for the traditional industrial countries of Western Europe. At present industry in these countries, especially light and heavy ones, is on its last legs. High-tech branches still hold on, but become weaker with every passing day.
The total degradation of the industrial base in Western Europe, meaning the deindustrialization of a huge region, which used to be the "workshop of the world," combined with the zero surplus and rapid ageing of the population and influx of immigrants, leads to a systemic crisis of entire West European civilization. This is a crisis which cannot be resolved within the framework of the model of a socially-oriented state, which has taken shape in Europe.
What we witness in Greece, Italy and Spain today is the "moment of truth," which has been postponed for quite some time, but which has now arrived. The tragedy of West Europeans is that in order to find a way out from this crisis they have to live through a very difficult revolution in their heads. We feel sorry for the poor West European working people. They have been given enormous social benefits. They have become used to high wages and salaries, prolonged vacations, free medical care, early retirement, high pensions, etc.
But to afford all this nations should produce, otherwise a huge bubble will gradually appear, which can be preserved for some time at the expense of credits. But sooner or later this bubble will burst. This is precisely what happened in Greece before our very eyes.
Regretfully, our West European friends have only one way out of the general crisis in Europe - through dismantling the socially-oriented state system, because it ceased to function properly. The overwhelming part of the population receives from the state more than it gives. In order to come out of the crisis the West Europeans have to live within their means, as they used to in the past.
Now let us try to see what this crisis means to Russia and what it should do in this situation.
Consequences for us
First of all, it should be admitted that we observe the present-day economic and financial troubles in the Old World with slight malevolence. We have suffered from inferiority complex in the face of well-to-do and comfortable Western Europe for quite a long time.
In its history Russia had to suffer from injustice coming from Western Europe many times. Nevertheless, we must get rid of malevolence. Despite all and sundry headaches and injuries, this part of the world continues to remain for us an anchor hold of civilization and the main source of modernization resource. This was the case of the time of Ivan III and Peter the Great. The situation remains the same today, too. Western Europe is the first trade partner of Russia, the first place of destination for most Russians, the first source of capital for investments in Russia, etc.
No matter how we position ourselves as an autonomous center of force - which is quite legitimate, - Russia still remains an inalienable part of "Greater Europe." All specific features of our national history notwithstanding, Russia has formed and developed in the channel of the general western and common Christian historical process. And in their general world outlook and perception the Russians are Europeans.
The crisis in Europe is not something accidental or isolated. This is a systemic crisis inherent in a highly developed capitalist society at a definite stage. It is inevitably conditioned by the desire of late capitalism to reconcile the irreconcilable - social peace, economic growth and super-high profit.
The October revolution of 1917 wrested Russia from the general historical process. But in the 1990s we again plopped down in the midst of it through shock and chaos. We nearly drowned, but managed somehow to emerge to the surface. And now we are drifting with the historical stream along with fellow-companions in the chosen model of
socio-economic development. We are moving in the same direction as the West Europeans, but with a certain time lag. The aim is the formation of a socially-oriented state carrying a heavy load of obligations to its citizens and solving the growing problem of the deficit of labor resources through the mass drawing of workforce from abroad.
So far, thank God, our population is not too pampered, it is used to be satisfied with a little. We are still far from the European level of the way of life and social expectations. But the trend does exist, and history is moving fast. If special correcting measures are not taken, we shall come across a similar crisis of imbalance in some twenty to twenty-five years. To boot, it will be augmented by the brutality of all historical manifestations typical of Russia and a still more dramatic problem of depopulation.
Incidentally, the United States is going along the same way, with a greater time lag. There is no large-scale deindustrialization, and the natural growth of the population is quite adequate. Immigration is taken in its stride. In other words, society is functioning all right. Nevertheless, there are visible signs of the West European "disease." And the coming of a systemic crisis is a question of time. In this situation one should draw lessons from the West European experience, analyze one's own position, and take measures for the radical improvement of the situation and its trends. Otherwise, it may be too late.
What do the present historical changes have in store for us? Can we believe that the changes in the world will gradually lead us to the formation of a universal community of kindness and justice? And accordingly, do we need to become concerned with our own security, or will historical process take care of everything?
National security in the interior
of good and evil
Undoubtedly, historical process with all its ups and downs leads to gradual improvement of welfare, prosperity and comfort. Previously, hundreds of thousands died from hunger annually, whereas now their number dropped to tens of thousands. Where average life span was 25 years before, it now reaches 50 or 60. Where several decades ago one bicycle was to several villages, now there are cheap scooters and motorcycles in almost every family, to say nothing of mobile phones, which are a common thing in the remotest villages and the poorest families.
It's a fact that the socio-economic indices, including those dealing with such vital aspects as provision with drinking water, sewage facilities, fresh food products, professional medical aid, telephone communications, etc., are steadily improving even in the farthest and most backward corners of the world.
However, material progress is one thing, and assertion of the good and kindness in human relations is another. It should be admitted that relations between people, and hence, between states gradually become more tolerant and human, at least in Western Europe.
Unfortunately, there are still too many expressions of cruelty and evil in the modern world, and they must not be ignored. Leaving aside the hope for the ultimate triumph of the good and kindness in the word, it becomes evident that the state can ensure its national security in two ways: through increasing of its own strength with all its components -both hard and soft, and through entering into alliances with stronger partners whose protection can safely be accepted.
At the present historical stage neither Russia nor other main international actors are ready to consider the option according to which Russia could become a junior partner of another, stronger state, of the
Austro-Hungary type under the German Empire, or Britain under the United States.
This means that we have to rely on our own forces in order to take a worthy place in the modern world and protect ourselves from any emergencies. Much has been said and written on this subject. But there is another one, which should well be mentioned in conclusion. It is the only instrument, which, despite its insufficiency and inferiority, can open the prospect of overcoming the systemic crisis threatening Russia. It is the subject of the role and tasks of the modern Russia state.
The state and democracy
Any state should act in three directions. First, to protect its population and territory from outside threats. Secondly, to ensure economic growth and the minimal level of prosperity. Thirdly, to maintain law and order and assert the value of human life. The state should not be too strong and aggressive because in that case it will trample upon civil society and human personality. At the same time it should not be too weak and amorphous, because in that case chaos, crime and suppression of human personality will be inevitable. The state should find its place somewhere in between.
For Western Europe, inasmuch as NATO still exists and provides security guarantees to all its members, the center of gravity in the activity of the state has shifted to second and third directions. For us the situation is about the same, although we have to take care of our outside security ourselves. But the main challenge which all states in the Old World, including Russia, come across remains unchanged - to pull their countries out of the deepest systemic crisis.
If our states cope with this task, it can be asserted that European civilization has a future. If not, the internal processes of depopulation,
deindustrialization and socio-political disintegration, and the loss of a significant role in world development, will become inevitable.
Of course, abstractedly, any state is an evil, because it suppresses the individual. But people have not been able so far to live without the state. Wherever it is absent, it is replaced by such a form of social organization as a gang.
There is no other way out from a crisis, which struck European civilization, than the strengthening of the state. Its success in coping with this situation will be evaluated by the future generations by its efficiency in overcoming this crisis. Whether this state is maturely democratic or slightly authoritarian is of little importance from the point of view of historical process and human destinies. Naturally, a democratic form of rule is preferable, especially when there are no serious internal crises and threats from outside. But let us not forget that democracy is only a form of the organization of the political system of a state, which has been identified most often with free elections. Democracy per se does not solve any problem - it does not increase production, combat crime, take care of the sick, or look after children. Everything depends on what essence we lend to this form.
Here is a vivid example taken from the recent past concerning "free elections." The United States insisted on holding free elections on the territory of the Palestinian Autonomy in 2006, although practically everybody realized at the time that victory in the elections would be won by HAMAS. And this was precisely what happened. Democracy seemed to have triumphed. But the Palestinian Autonomy has become divided into two enclaves - the West Bank ruled by FATH and the Gaza Sector ruled by HAMAS. Much blood has been spilt. The peace process has been blocked. A question arises as to whether it was worthwhile to claim free democratic elections so insistently.
Or take Iraq. After the nine years of American occupation it is now a free democratic country and free democratic elections take place there. It's all good and well. Previously Iraq was ruled by a fierce dictator who cruelly suppressed his people, used chemical weapon against the Kurdish minority, killed Shia Muslims en masse, waged wars with his neighbors, and threatened the entire region. Yes, all this was true. Yet, women in Baghdad could wear short skirts and go about bareheaded, and the Christian minority numbering almost 1.5 million people felt safe in their churches and at home. Now there are only 500,000 Christians left in Iraq. We know about the present situation concerning women and religious minorities in Iraq. We also know that the position of women and religious minorities is among the main indicators of the civilizatory maturity of any society. What will be the end of the "Arab spring" and the fate of democracy in the Arab countries,
who have made a breakthrough to "free elections," is a big question.
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What kind of a state does Russia need after the chaotic dismantling of the Soviet Union and the rather hasty formation of the present Russian statehood in the 1990s?
I think we need a state of the Li Kuang Yuo type, with certain modifications, of course, because we are not Chinese. A strong and effective state capable to cope with socio-economic problems and protect its citizens from terrorists and other criminals, and from financial-economic vicissitudes.
I wish the same to all West European states.
"Rossiya v globalnoi politike", Moscow, 2012, No 3, May-June.
