Radio Free Europe (yes, they still exist) have an article on their Web site, about the threat to democracy represented by public cynicism and corruption. While I don’t expect democracy to collapse in Eastern Europe just yet, I can’t disagree with their concern. Curiously, a reader comment on the same Web site by a “Sergey” from New York (originally from Ukraine) provides, perhaps unwittingly, a perfect demonstration of the first point: Sergey writes that “there is no ‘democracy, market economy, and civil society’, not in EU, not in US”, calling democracy “just another utopia”, and questioning the wisdom of “supporting corrupt and malfunctioning ‘democracies’ in Ukraine and Georgia” (do I detect more than a tinge of Russian nationalism here?).
Nov 182009