Page 449 - Cultures and Organizations

414 IMPLICATIONS

The influences of values and of economic prosperity imply that a num-
ber of Western political axioms cannot be applied to non-Western coun-
tries and are not very helpful as global guidelines:

■ The solution of pressing global problems does not presuppose world-
wide democracy. The rest of the world is not going Western. Authori-
tarian governments will continue to prevail in most of the world. The
rise of China and India will affect hierarchy in corporations and in
international collaboration worldwide. Elections are not a universal
solution to political problems. In poor, collectivist, high-PDI and
strong UAI cultures, elections may generate more problems than they
resolve. One example is Algeria, where the first general elections in

1990 were won by fundamentalists committed to end political free-
doms, after which the military declared the results invalid, and a wave
of terrorism set in, which lasted for eight years and made tens of thou-
sands of victims. Another example is Russia, where the disappearance
of communism and of the Soviet Union in 1991 left a power vacuum;
institutions necessary to execute democratically taken decisions were

missing, and the local mafia established a kleptocracy (government by
thieves). An authoritarian government again took hold.
■ Free market capitalism cannot be universal; it presumes an individu-
alist mentality that is missing in most of the world. Chapter 4 showed
a statistical relationship between individualism and national wealth,
but with the arrow of causality pointing from wealth to individualism:
countries became more individualist after they increased in wealth,
not wealthier by becoming more individualist. Free market capitalism
suits countries already wealthy and is unlikely to turn poor countries
into wealthy ones. The “dragon” economies of East Asia that grew

very fast in the mid-1960s to mid-1990s had a variety of economic
systems with often strong involvement of government.
■ Economic development has ecological costs, which economists tend to
ignore. The Western democracies’ standard of living implies a degree
of environmental pollution and depletion of resources that precludes
extending this standard of living to the entire world population.

Whoever seeks development for everybody should find a new way of
handling our ecosystem: sustaining the rich countries’ quality of life
but drastically reducing its ecological cost. The concept of economic
growth may in this respect already be obsolete; another measure for