The Orange County Register
Monday, August 13, 2007
The Orange Grove: Armenia reflects its Soviet legacy
The scenic region lacks basic infrastructure, but not sullen border guards.
TIBOR MACHAN
Ethics professor at Chapman University
Adviser to Freedom Communications
Tsakhkadzor, Armenia – This place, a winter sports complex, has some
of the most impressive terrain for winter athletics outside of New
Zealand and Switzerland. Except that it is nearly totally in
tatters. Apart from some recently installed modern structures, this
city perched at about 6,600 feet is merely a shadow of what it could
be.
While giving my lectures to about 25 young people in this (for me)
remote part of the globe, I had one recurring thought, albeit mostly a
fantasy: Import as many Swiss here as there are Armenians living in
the region. Allow these Swiss imports to take over every aspect of
social and economic life, and see the place transformed into, well, a
replica of Switzerland. Yes, the basic ingredients are all
here. Stunning mountains and river rapids cutting across them all;
weather that has all the variety of what is available in Austria or
Switzerland.
But – and this is a really big "but" – there is no infrastructure or
development in any way comparable to that you get in those European
countries far to the west of here.
Departing the neighboring nation of Georgia, I was driven to
Tsakhkadzor by car – well, actually, by two cars; the first took me to
the border between Georgia and Armenia, then a second car drove me
from the border to the town. That’s because taking a car across this
border involves a bureaucratic nightmare. Even doing it as we had to –
namely, walking across the bridge that connects the two countries –
amounted to a truly annoying experience. The guards manning the shacks
where passports and visas were being examined cared not a wit about
facilitating the traffic.
They were every bit like the border guards used to be in the old
communist Eastern Europe – in the Soviet-era Bulgaria, Romania,
Hungary or Albania. They treated us all as if the last thing on Earth
they wanted to do is to have to provide the service they are
officially there to provide, which is to enable folks to move between
the two countries.
Of course, the roads in Armenia are a disaster. Potholes everywhere,
the size of small craters; cattle and sheep blocking traffic
throughout the journey, trash strewn by the roadside, you name it. And
there are virtually no facilities – no places to eat, to stop to rest,
nothing except a few dilapidated buildings that seem ready to collapse
as one makes use of them.
Armenia, as a former Soviet republic, was part of that wondrous
experiment with socialism but even then it got the short end of the
stick, judging by how it looks now.
Its current woes are too complicated to even hint at here. Yet the
countryside is often stunning, if only one ignores the elements that
human beings have added to it all.
And talk about pollution. If only some of our Western
environmentalists could take a few lessons from how an essentially
state-managed country deals with waste and soot. They might start
becoming more sensible about trusting government to solve
environmental problems. The tragedy of the commons stares one in the
face everywhere.
Nevertheless, the young people who sat around the conference room
where we discussed elements of classical liberalism and libertarianism
were bright and surprisingly interested in how a free system of law
and public policy would approach the problems facing human
communities. Their questions, objections, and speculations were every
bit as intelligent, if not more so, than those of their Western
university counterparts.
For most of them, of course, the idea that individuals – rather than
the government or state – are sovereign was radical; its implications
even more so. But they understood, often from elementary personal
examples, what it means to take charge of one’s life and to deal with
other people with the full recognition that they, too, are in charge
of their lives.
They were initially incredulous about the classical-liberal
demythologization of states and governments but once they grasped that
those were all nothing but human beings posing as superior to others,
they got it pretty quickly.
Still, I left the region without being able to shake that fantasy, of
importing a few million Swiss and letting them loose on Armenia. That
would turn out to be some country.