Social Harmony with Variable Geometry

Eastern European communism lived its own harmony: miserable, frozen, transparent but egalitarian. Eastern capitalism has failed to absolve everybody of the frugality of life. A boiling social volcano tends to undermine its values, known as the foundations of sustainable economic development. Without the necessary surplus of wealth, redistribution seems to be the courted path towards a new social order. The Easterners are deluded by the illusion that the equally redistributed inequalities are as bearable as absolute equality in poverty. Based on a new social contract, they put their fate in the arms of a new state. Electoral reasons make it a captive state, which ensures the loyalty of the electorate by displaying its redistributive impulses. The chapter reveals how such a state becomes the manager of a simulacrum of democracy, the feeder of a large-scale clientele system, opposed to sustainable development.