Books in Brief: The Psychology of East-West Trade

The Psychology of East-West Trade, by Zygmunt Nagorski Jr. (Mason & Lipscomb, 228 pp., $9.95). Somewhere between the euphoria (naive) that greeted detente in 1972, and the reality (harsh) of subsequent trade problems with the Soviet Union lies the potential (uncertain) of mutually advantageous economic exchange with politically obnoxious nations. This reflective book holds that technology is forcing economic cooperation among ideological adversaries. The perspective is open-eyed, historic, and antidogmatic. It reminds us that past efforts at East-West trade, from Czar Nicholas to Lenin, have failed. Soviet growth statistics are neatly debunked, and the productivity of the Soviet economy is shown to be quite utterly awful. Still, a certain teleological optimism remains—a diluted form of the wishful thinking that dominates academic discussion of such issues. The U.S. and Russia are said to need each other, though the need on our side seems to be limited to a dependence (unthinkable) on Soviet energy materials (undependable). Capitalism and socialism are presumed to “converge,” though from the cited success of desocialization in Eastern Europe it might well be concluded that we should let them do the converging. Peace is supposed to emerge from this convergence and from commercial interdependence, even though the past is strewn with the wreckage of conflict between briskly trading partners with homogeneous economic systems. All issues of the rights and dignity of individuals are neglected, if not dismissed as mere “ideology”—even as morality is nowadays reduced to mores, and truth to opinion. But these are the common faults of our times, and do not detract from the value of this thoughtful and informative discussion.