“Social disintegration is not a spectator sport”
Parsing Globalization: Samir Amin, Dani Rodrik, and Joseph Stiglitz
In July 1993 a new open-air museum opened on the southern outskirts of Budapest. Memento Park featured dozens of Communist-era monuments that had been put in storage a few years earlier when Hungary ended decades of one-party rule. Among them were a bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin, which had long stood in the city center, and granite statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which had loomed over the entrance to the Hungarian Communist Party’s headquarters. In creating what was effectively a Communist theme park, Budapest’s city council wasn’t honoring the patron saints of Marxist-Leninism: it was trying to stimulate the local economy. “It is more interesting for tourists than for Hungarians,” Mayor Gábor Demszky explained. “We want it to become an international attraction.”1
Hungary had established a multiparty democracy in October 1989, the month before the Berlin Wall came down. During the following two years, the Soviet Union unraveled, and the Cold War came to an end. By 1993 Mayor Demszky wasn’t the only one eager to move on from forty years of ideological struggle, which had climaxed, during the 1980s, with the dramatic sight of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, after both championing huge arms buildups, engaging with a reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. In early 1992 the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping restarted the economic reform program that he and his Communist Party colleagues had halted after crushing the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. During a visit to Shenzhen, a Special Economic Zone in southern China that had been established to attract foreign investment, Deng said: “Development is the only hard truth. It doesn’t matter if policies are labeled socialist or capitalist, so long as they foster development.”2 India, too, was taking steps to reinvigorate its moribund economy. Under the guidance of finance minister Manmohan Singh, an Oxbridge-educated economist, the Congress Party government liberalized trade, removed restrictions on foreign investment, and chopped back the “License Raj,” a bureaucratic quagmire that required businesses to obtain approval from many different government agencies before they could enter a new market or open a new factory.
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