International Reporting Project - Seminar Highlights

Lack of a Middle Class in Former Soviet States and Eastern Europe Weakens Democracy and Breeds Cynicism, Says Noted Russia Scholar

By Noel C. Paul, Fall 2003 IRP Fellow

WASHINGTON, September 8, 2003 - Despite increasing economic and social integration with Western Europe and the United States, the overwhelming majority of people in East and Central Europe and Russia have no influence over their nation's political process, and are growing more cynical about democracy as a result, a leading scholar said today.

The term "direct democracy" -- in which a small number of elites bargains amongst itself to preserve its interests -- best describes the administration of post-communist, Eurasian countries, Ilya Prizel, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, said.

"What these nations need in order for democracy to function is a middle class," Prizel told a IRP Fellows seminar. He said one example of elite control is Russia, where the absence of fair and predictable property rights has slowed the growth of a middle class. The result: politicians and elites have not been held accountable for the direction in which they have taken the country.

"Given his record, I'm not sure Boris Yeltsin could have been reelected anywhere else," Prizel said.

A similar environment exists in Eastern and Central Europe, where the impending incorporation of several countries into the European Union has come with very little debate among average citizens about the benefits and costs of such a step, Prizel said.

"The votes for inclusion were presented not as a choice but as a vote of affirmation," Prizel said. "In this way, these referendum were not building blocks of development, but of cynicism."

Possible side effects of the growing cynicism, Prizel said, include the public's complete detachment from politics, its unrealistic search for political saviors, and politicians' increasing use of nationalism to feed on public resentment toward other European nations.

Strengthening democracy in Eurasia might require some very basic but vitally important economic reforms. "The first thing to introduce is a stable currency, and then a banking system will do a lot," Prizel said.