Belarus Compared with Latvia

Here is an interesting perspective on Belarus and Latvia offered by US economists Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Summers-The Myth of the Baltic Tigers, The Death of "Social Europe"-which is critical of the doctrinaire IMF neoliberal model imposed upon it in past years.

The standard mantra (as recently rolled out in The Economist) is that Latvia’s taciturn and honest prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis, won re-election in October even after imposing the harshest tax and austerity policies ever adopted during peacetime, because the “mature” electorate realized this was necessary, “defying conventional wisdom” by voting in an austerity government.

What is interesting is how politics in Latvia is divided on the basis of ethnicity and how populist nationalism has dovetailed with the imposition of neoliberal economics, whereby the nationalists are a symptom of the disease of which they pretend to be the cure.

Moreover, after the economic collapse of 2009, many Latvians decided to be apathetic or follow large numbers of angry Poles in repudiating their nation and voting with their feet to go and work and live in the West. One more consequence of the mantra of 'There is No Alternative' .

While the economic crisis was deep enough to drive even Latvia’s depoliticized population into the streets in the winter of 2009, most Latvians soon after found the path of least resistance to be simply to emigrate. Neoliberal austerity has created demographic losses exceeding Stalin’s deportations back in the 1940s (although without the latter’s loss of life). As government cutbacks in education, health care and other basic social infrastructure threaten to undercut long-term development, young people are emigrating rather than to suffer in an economy without jobs. Over 12 per cent of the overall population (and a much larger percentage of its labor force) now works abroad.

A land with hardly more than a million people lost 100,000 of its youngest and most ambitious to emigration after EU accession, almost half of them to Ireland. The Latvian government then toyed with importing workers from Ghana.

This is a fact never mentioned by those Euro-Atlanticists such as Timothy Garton Ash as such facts are subversive but some facts are more subversive than others, not least if the facts are used to prove the prescriptions of an Atlanticist narrative of neoliberalism and "People Power".

One Latvian one remarked that "During the Cold War we all dreamed of leaving but the risk is that everyone leaves, then the country will disappear". Hudson and Summers compare that with performance with Belarus whilst offering no rationalisation for authoritarian rule.

Given the geographic proximity of Latvia and Belarus, it is illuminating to compare how neoliberals have assessed their respective economies. Latvia suffered Europe’s largest economic collapse in 2008 and 2009, with continuing double-digit unemployment. Its economy will show no growth until this year (2011), and its modest growth likely will remain accompanied by double-digit unemployment. A huge slice of its population has evacuated the country, leaving many children with relatives or to fend for themselves. Neighboring Belarus, with few of Latvia’s geographic advantages (ports and beaches), has a per capital GDP not too far behind Latvia’s. Belarus had a boom with double-digit growth before the crisis, and kept its economy at full employment during the crisis rather than collapsing by the 25 per cent rate that plagued Latvia. Belarus also has a GINI coefficient (inequality) roughly on par with Sweden, while Latvia’s is closer to the widening inequality levels that now characterize the United States.

Yet neoliberal Latvia is declared a success model and Belarus a failure. The CIA’s World Factbook reminds its readers that Belarus’s economic performance occurred “despite the roadblocks of a tough, centrally directed economy.” This is the standard characterization of Belarus. But one needs to ask to what degree its success may reflect its central planning. Latvia has produced greater political freedom for dissidents, but Belarus has less economic inequality and foreign debt.

Every economy in history has been a mixed economy. We are not defending Comrade Lukashenko’s media and political repression in Belarus. We simply are not going to the opposite extreme of applauding Latvia’s neoliberal model. One can criticize Belarus’ political system without endorsing the electoral oligarchy that characterizes much of Latvia’s political life. Yet win or lose on economic outcomes, in the western press and academies Latvia and the Starving Baltic Tigers will be declared the winners, while Belarus always will be declared the loser on economic performance, regardless of achievement. You will not see a measured look at both nations’ economies to examine objectively where they are succeeding and failing (including by sector) with an eye for what lessons might be derived from such an investigation. Economic comparisons are entirely political.

Our intention is not to blame the Latvian nation for the cruel neoliberal policy experiment to which it has been subjected, to question the global community of policymakers, intellectuals and some of Latvia’s own elites that persist in pursuing this failed policy and even recommend it to other countries as a path of growth rather than economic and demographic suicide.

Perhaps one day those such as Garton Ash can start to deal with the stark and depressing reality of undemocratic IMF "reforms" and the mantra of There is No Alternative, as it is one that has vastly diminished the People Power creed he continually advocates.

The Best Democratic Opposition Money can Buy in Russia.

The problem with liberals lecturing Russia about the repressive measures used by Putin to disperse demonstrations is that Putin has been able to do so because few in Russia actually care about the Western backed "opposition", many of whom consistently backed a Yeltsin regime that had an appalling record on human rights in the 1990s.

Simon Tisdall writes in the Guardian today,,

The jailing of several leading opposition figures, including former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, has hammered another large nail into the coffin of free expression in Russia, human rights activists and foreign observers say.

Many Western media outlets only seem to be interested in human rights when that means the human rights of those such as Nemtsov who as Mayor of Nizhinii Novgorod and fanatical supporter of Chubais "shock therapy" plunged millions of Russians into starvation and appalling poverty whilst looting the economy.

These oligarchs are no less ruthless that Putin's new Russian state. The reason their cause is supported by those such as Edward Lucas ( "The New Cold War" ) and Simon Tisdall is that the wrong oligarchs are in power in Russia. Tisdall writes,

Anxious perhaps to dispel any impression he was abashed by the Khodorkovsky uproar, Putin sent in the heavies. Nemtsov was arrested and jailed for 15 days for "disobeying police". Three other opposition leaders – Eduard Limonov, Konstantin Kosyakin and Ilya Yashin – were also incarcerated.

There is no mention, of course, that Limonov is explicitly a Fascist who has run a movement named "The National Bolsheviks" that uses explicit Nazi and Soviet insignia and Fascist policies and threatening mob demonstrations.

There is a difference between the idea that people ought to have freedom of assembly and protest and the notion that those complaining about being restricted in their protests by having to get permission from the Kremlin are necessarily virtuous martyrs for democracy.

It is about time serious consideration was given to the way monied oligarchs and those able to project media power are able to use human rights cynically as a way of gaining influence and possibly power by exploiting the shortcomings of the current regime.

To support Nemstov and Limanov is about as much of an "ethical foreign policy" as the West supporting somebody such as Pinochet had Allende's government resorted to the repression of opponents to secure power and Pinochet had then cited human rights as a reason he should gain power.

The opposition is funded by US NGO's in a way that simply would not be tolerated in Washington on the scale it is in Russia. Russians both the new emerging middle class and the workers and peasants are not going to be lectured by Washington think tanks, "The Other Russia" or Garry Kasparov.

To promote liberal democracy in Russia means neither supporting Putin nor the opposition which is full of those ruthless ideologues who were discredited by being part of a regime under Yeltsin that forcibly closed down the Duma in 1993, shelled the building and used military force to kill demonstrators.

Western liberals need to understand how and why Putin has been able to secure power and why he is popular compared to those like Nemtsov whose Union of Rightist Forces are detested. Citing anti-semitism ( Khodorkovsky and Nemtsov are Jewish) is an evasion and does not provide the deeper reason.

For the fact is that Putin's managed democracy, whatever people think about it in the West, has delivered better living standards and has not dispersed protesters with guns, tanks and helicopters. Nemstov has been put in prison for 15 days for leading that protest, something that will make Putin popular.

The "liberal" opposition in Russia was anything but when shock therapists such as Gaidar and Chumais and Nemtsov ruled Russia. Neoliberal policies led to a collapse in living standards whilst billions enriched the oligarchs who siphoned off wealth no less than Western businesses.

The hypocrisy of those such as Lucas and Tisdall is gliding over the sordidness of the "transition" remains an obstacle to convincing many in Russia that a strong state that will protect the country from Western energy and banking corporations and mafia style oligarchs controlling it again.

The reason the energy hungry West continually supports those such as Yabloko, the Union of Rightist Forces and neoliberal shock therapy fanatics as it would ideally aim at breaking up Gazprom, to gain a stake in Russia's vast oil and gas reserves and destroy Russia as a global player.

There is no possible way that Russia would ever allow that to happen again and so the support for those as Limanov and Nemstov is not only unethical as a foreign policy but also completely unrealistic. Putin would not care less if David Cameron snubbed him or lectured him about human rights or the war with Georgia in 2008 ( which Georgia initiated ).

More broadly, there is however something increasingly ominous about how in East and West democracy is becoming controlled by the money and media power of corporations, plutocrats and oligarchs. In that sense, it seems Russia, EU states and the USA are increasingly learning from one another.

Supporting freedom of conscience and assembly is right as both are essential human rights. For that Putin has been rightly criticised. Yet it should not follow that Western figures should see the repression of certain oppositionists as proof that the oppositionists are thus rightful democracy lovers.

That would be as absurd as pretending that the Bolsheviks just because they were against the Tsar, were necessarily better due the repressive nature of Tsarism and the Okhrana. The same should apply to neoliberal Market Bolsheviks.

Increasingly oppositionists in less developed nations in post-Soviet nations are becoming only "the best democracy that money can buy" and where the considerations of ordinary people are passed over in greedy and rapacious elite struggles.