Freedom...?

In light of yesterday's column, I've been giving considerable thought to the Cold War. I decided to download the Soviet National Anthem on iTunes but, of course, I don't speak Russian. I located English translations of the text and something piqued my curiosity. The word: "Freedom" is a predominant theme in the text. I began to wonder what the word means in that context as opposed to what it means in ours.

Historically speaking, both cultures have extraordinary differences in how they encountered freedom. I'll begin with the U.S.

As many of us are well aware, we were a colony of the British Empire whose governmental model was a monarchy bound by a constitution. As our revolution approached, a new idea was circulating among western intellectuals pioneering what is referred to as the Enlightenment. Along with the Social Contract and the Vindication of the Rights of Man (and Woman), The Wealth of Nations arose to speak of the next stage of Western Economy -- Capitalism. Until then the model was primarily Mercantilism, which followed what one of my professors once called: "The Golden Rule: Which is, he who has the gold makes the rules." Colonialism was a foreseeable offspring to this model.

Kings sent merchants under their flag to set up shop in foreign lands. Initially, the project was for these merchants to gather as much gold as they could, but this quickly morphed into other valuable commodities. Spices, for instance, were a major factor in King Ferdinand's and Queen Isabella's financing of Christopher Colombus' journey to the East just as ivory was a major factor in the Belgians' interest in the Congo.

Anyway, Adam Smith posited that the nation which would triumph under such a model, would be that nation which allowed their colonists to operate with as much free reign as possible -- something made much easier with the shrinking influence of the Catholic Church. This is not to say that Smith was promoting any inhumanity -- he's strictly speaking of economic freedom. Minimal tax requirements, minimal restriction of the trade that allowed colonists to make their living, and minimal restriction of the freedom to engage in enterprise for private gain -- were all ingredients to building a Nation's Wealth. But the most essential restriction to be kept to a minimum was that on capital. With capital flowing freely, more opportunities for growth would emerge. For Adam Smith, capital meant labor, labor meant production, and production meant wealth -- so long as there was demand for the thing being produced.

When the Magna Carta was drafted and "No Taxation Without Representation" became the law of the land, it was done so for the purpose of sowing economic freedom in the rule of law -- though this occurred before Adam Smith. So when colonists became frustrated with the King's taxation policies (expecting a more capitalist model than mercantilist), they had no voice since they were not represented in Parliament.

The underlying gripe with the colonists was that the Social Contract had been broken through this taxation. After much discussion and deliberation, we declared our independence knowing that such an action was certain to bring war. But we did it for freedom. Patrick Henry framed it in an existential context when he said: "Give me Liberty, or Give me Death!"

We won our independence from Great Britain, and the conversation has been going on internally ever since. Our earliest cultural history tells us that freedom means outside the realm of absolute state control. To preserve this freedom, we constructed our own representative government and gave it oversight and limits on the degree to which it may interfere with the private affairs of its citizenry.

Then, the industrial revolution came. This led to a population shift with the development of urban centers as an alternative to agrarian and small-town merchant communities. The U.S. experience is that this all happened under a representative governmental model defined by a constitution. Although, some have argued that this model became corrupted by large monied interests.

This experience was far from Universal. Not every Western nation had a government in whom the citizens placed legitimacy. I'm thinking of Russia. For Russia, the industrial revolution came about in the world while that nation was still ruled by an absolute monarch. Thus as urban centers developed (though small in the still largely agrarian landscape), the industrial system was seen by the people as a tool of governmental oppression -- specifically at the hands of the Tsar. Rather than viewing industrialization as the means toward a free state (as the U.S. did), it was viewed by the Bolsheviks as a barrier to it.

Though this was not necessarily the case of all Bolsheviks. In the 1920s, following the revolution, there was an interesting event in the world of bilateral trade agreements: The Anglo-Soviet Trade Pact. Essentially this was an oil deal between Great Britain and the Soviet Union, which was met with great controversy among party hardliners such as Joseph Stalin. It, along with other pieces of Lenin's "New Economic Policy," was seen as appeasement to the Bourgeois West and treason of Communist ideology. Though Lenin warned against the dangers of isolationism, coupled with his death in 1924 and the exile and subsequent murder of Leon Trotsky -- Stalin and the hardliners prevailed and pioneered the Command Economy adhering to a Five-Year Plan. This was the birth of what came to be known as Stalinist Communism.

How could the West communicate effectively with the Soviets about policy when each had a different understanding of the concept of "freedom"? Because neither side could agree on this concept, each side was met by the other with immediate suspicion.

Peculiarly enough, I once came across an article in Foreign Affairs that was attempting to re-frame U.S. relations with the Middle East. The article said something I had never heard before -- that the English word "freedom" (as we understand it) does not have a direct translation in Arabic. According to the article, when our word "freedom" is translated into Arabic it is often done with a word that comes closer to our meaning of "justice". It also said that the idea of "free" in Arabic culture is simply associated with not being owned or not being a slave.

I've often wondered to what degree this disagreement of meaning has contributed to our current conflict.