RALF DAHRENDORF
519
Freedom to choose one's profession, freedom of movement, and arguably,
limits to the progression of taxation belong in this category.
This is to say that neither demand management
a
la Keynes nor social
security
a
la Beveridge is constitutionally incompatible with an open society.
Indeed, many economic patterns which no textbook would describe as capi–
talist exist in democracies. The Japanese economy is hardly capitalist, with its
large companies and their organized relations within the Ministry of Interna–
tional Trade and Industry. In Germany the role of the big banks, and of an
informal network of major employers and trade unionists, coupled with
codetermination and a highly developed welfare state, is hardly compatible
with the publicly professed market economy. Sweden is in no strict sense a
capitalist country. Yet these and others with their own idiosyncrasies are–
with reservations in the case ofJapan - open societies. The constitutional
prerequisites of democracy are present.
The examples suggest an answer to your questions (and to the
Utopian visions of the Swiss author whom, for the sake of clarity, I have
perhaps treated a little harshly). There do exist aspects of economic order
which belong to the constitution of liberty. They are, as it were, nonnego–
tiable. In your own country, as in others under Communist domination, some
of them were absent. There was no law of monopoly. There was instead a
near-total state monopoly. Private property was absent or severely re–
stricted. Basic economic freedoms were missing. Without any "intercultural
dialogue" aimed at compromise, and with a mishmash of systems, these
missing elements of the open society will have to be established
if
liberty is to
stay. Like the common language which we speak again, such elements are
neither East nor West nor Central European, but universal prerequisites of
freedom.
Then there is normal politics. If you want your country to be not only
a home of free speech and political choice, but also a place of prosperity and
economic opportunity, I strongly recommend many of the liberal policies
which your courageous Minister of Finance Balcerowicz - or his Czech
counterpart Vaclav Klaus, and some others elsewhere - are pursuing. Some
elements of this policy border on the constitutional, but most are the legiti–
mate subject of political debate and therefore of divergent views. American–
style capitalism is only one way forward; few countries anywhere in the
world have opted for it. Britain may have displayed some similar traits in an
earlier phase of modern economic development, but the two reformers
whom I like to quote, Keynes and Beveridge, were after all British, and of
Keynes it has been said that he saved capitalism by destroying it. The eco–
nomic structures of France and Germany, ofItaly and Spain, of the Nether–
lands and Sweden, are different in dozens of significant respects. There is no
Central European model; there are as many models as there are countries.
Thus, the notion of a third, or middle way is not only wrong in theory
