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thinking that you can introduce a market economy into a country
which has no law. This is nonsense. Hong Kong contains four percent of
the population of China and produces thirty percent of its gross national
product. This has nothing to do with anything cultural. It has to do
with the English common law which prevails in Hong Kong and not
elsewhere, and which gives security to contract. There is no such thing as
a market economy without security of contract. This is why there has
been no transformation in Russia or Eastern Europe, except in the
Czech lands where law has always been part of the local spirit. In
Bulgaria, if you have a contract you can enforce it only if you call in the
Russian Mafia to go to your partner's house with a machine gun. I
think the Russian situation now is catastrophic, because of the attempt
to
introduce the market economy first and law second: it should be
done the other way around.
Brigitte Berger:
In defense of Claudio's culture thesis, I would add
that of course laws are important, but in Russia, for example, there also
is a cultural tradition which does allow for a market economy.
Historically, there has to be some kind of cultural transformation before
the establishment of modern law.
Peter Berger: I
have the utmost respect for English common law and its
property rights, but the British Empire established it all over Africa with
meager results - in terms of its combination of that legal structure with
the existing cultures.
Zachary Karabell:
Yes, we need metaphors, and it is probably better
to formulate metaphors than not to organize a messy universe, but there
is the danger of a metaphor changing into a cliche. Furthermore, you
have set up a dichotomy with the "hedgehog" as an insupportable eco–
nOrrllC and social system in a modern world and the "fox" as a support–
able system. Yet, according to Isaiah Berlin, the definition of a hedgehog
is someone who relates everything to a single, central vision,
to
one sys–
tem or world as coherent or articulate. It strikes me that this is exactly
what you have done in your analysis of our culture. If the hedgehog re–
presents an insupportable cultural and econOrrllC system that should be
overthrown, how can it serve as a supportable intellectual system by
which to define culture?
Claudo Veliz:
You are right to bring up this point, but I would ob–
serve that although Latin America is indeed the home of much diversity,
its character is such that it can be accommodated by this metaphor. To
