Comments by "" (@FOLIPE) on "Was the economic transition of Eastern Europe to capitalism successful?" video.
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My opinions on the video.
1. While of course history matters when it comes to transition to democracy, trying to claim Poland has a democratic tradition by resorting to things that had happened hundreds of years ago, while dismissing "arab and muslim" states some of which have a longer and more recent democratic history is, plainly put, extremely biased. I think that the transition to democracy in eastern europe shows the difficulties of implementing full liberal democracy even when completely integrating the countries into european/western institutions in good faith, and the flagship cases of that are Poland and Hungary, not Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. I do believe the neocolonial narrative is mostly correct, but its never so simple. It's not a naive understanding of history or trying to explain everything away as "inequality" but understanding that inequality is indeed built in into everything humans do, which, if ignored, leads to idiotic policies. The conditions of being the peryphery of western europe and the peryphery of Russia (even if under capitalism in both cases) are completely different, even because eastern europe is mostly incorporated in good faith into the western institutions (even if in subordinated fashion). Similarly, if comparing eastern europe it with other western european perypheries even, like North Africa, it's clearly more developed and incorporated in good faith as the overarching "european project" for those regions is different. These conditions make it so that eastern europeans can plausibly believe that they can catch up to Europe and get integrated into the "center" without needing to break away in a more dramatic manner from "neocolonial" hierarchical economic systems - which I do believe is possibly true. However, it's not a universal situation, as the path being offered to eastern europe is rather unique globally. So the good thing about this "neocolonial narrative" is that it allows one to understand well both eastern Europe's uniqueness and similarities to other regions of the world like the Middle East and Latin America.
3. Immigration is a part of the package of western integration in the curent european model, it's not a problem that can be easily detangled from the rest of the system.
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