Reform and Market Democracy

(Hardback)

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For Eastern European and other countries, market democracy offers an organizing principle for reform. This work stresses the importance for such an organizing principle, asserting that without it the state will again assume dominance, and the political and economic structure will be taken over by well-organized special interests to the detriment of the rest of society. In such a scenario, reform simply perpetuates the interests of the ever-active political elite and bureaucracy. Market democracy, the culmination of more than 300 years of economic and political thought, is centered on a pluralistic democracy with a free-market-oriented society. Proponents of market democracy do not share the Marxist pretention that commandeering society is the one way to assure prosperity and freedom; they are equally sceptical of the nationalism which has replaced Marxism in many of these countries as the guiding spirit of government. This study draws on the experience of the Austro-Hungarian Empre, demonstrating the futility of promoting narrow nationalism in the ethnic hodgepodge that constitutes the population in this part of Europe.

Author Bio

GEORGE MACESICH is Professor of Economics, and Founding Director of the Center for Yugoslav-American Studies, Research, and Exchanges at Florida State University, Tallahassee. He is the author of 12 books, including Money and Democracy, (Praeger, 1990) and World Debt and Stability (Praeger, 1991).