A BASIS FOR MISUNDERSTANDING

I cannot help feeling sorry for Richard Morningstar, US President Clinton’s adviser on the Newly Independent States, in his talks with Ukrainian Deputy Premier for the Economy Serhiy Tyhypko in Kyiv. While they must certainly have agreed on certain things, one doubts whether either really understood what the other thought he was agreeing to. I recall a book written by two Dmytros of President Kuchma’s inner circle, Messrs. Vydrin and Tabachnyk, Ukraine on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century: Political Aspects, the first paragraph of the first chapter reads to the effect that Ukraine, like other postcommunist states, still lacks a civil society “in its traditionally understood sense,” that is, where most people share the same values, beliefs, and such. Now, I hate to be pedantic, but what they defined was not civil society, giving rise to the interesting possibility that these authors might meet with George Soros and immediately agree that Ukraine lacks civil society and has to build it immediately, each party remaining blissfully unaware that they had totally different understandings of the content of what they thought they had agreed about. And I think the same thing most likely happened with Messrs. Morningstar and Tyhypko.

Take such little things as privatization and transition to a market economy. The West understands this as getting the state out of the management of enterprises, which are to be turned into private profit-making enterprises or allowed to go bankrupt, radical deregulation of the economy, the reduction of state personnel and functions, and, as a result, a reduced need for state budget revenues allowing a tax system which would make it profitable to provide goods and services legally. Mr. Tyhypko seems to understand it as a way to get foreign investment for enterprises, with the state retaining effective control and the bureaucrats working for his economic block of the government keeping all their jobs and functions. The trouble is that anyone with even a passing acquaintance of Western economics will tell you that while Mr. Morningstar’s understanding leads ultimately to the First World, Mr. Tyhypko’s leads straight to the Third.