VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

ADRIAN PĂCURAR 57
eastern European citizen, after a short visit in western part of the continent,
is very quickly able to realize the huge disparity between his country and the
western world. And from this is very easy to experience the feeling described
by us a little bit earlier.
The second intermediate conclusion is linked with the first one and it
consists in the idea that the Eastern European consumer does not have the
conscience that his consumption style is a proper and authentic capitalization
of a historical economic surplus. The new consumer from Eastern Europe is
not the typical western consumer but much more likely is a sort of hybrid
between the western standard consumer and the new type of citizen recently
liberated from communism in the East of the old continent. Of course, it
would be very hard to deny that even in this situation the eastern consumer
does not have the core of the western consumer mentality, at least he is
trying to get it, but anyway, it is still far away from the genuine consumer
mentality of the western world. For the consumer from the new free market
economies of Europe it just the beginning of a stage trough which the
western world had already passed after the World War II.
Following the above idea it is worth to notice that the difference
regarding mentality between western countries in general and the countries
recently emerged from communism era is also a very pregnant one when we
talk about consumption and the capitalist frame of thinking in general. We
believe that a significant majority of economic annalists and commentators
have not underlined enough this subject and this is maybe the principal
reason for what any attempt to understand the new Eastern European free
market economies it could not be a proper one as long we are ignoring
mentality. For example, the standard Eastern European citizen does not
have the same mentality and attitude about consumption society and
consumerism in general as his homologue from the West. The citizen from
Eastern European new free market economies does not have the conscience
that his consumption is a natural fruit which was made possible after a whole
road of stages regarding structural development of the economy. For a
western citizen it is almost every time very clear the fact that his standard of
life was achieved during a historical accumulation of health and the whole set
of goods that consumption society is making available on the market for him
was also a result of a very long time of hard work within a solid and healthy
capitalist economy. Even if this situation is not always present in an explicit
form within the mind of western consumers it always can be easily disclosed.
In the opposition with this is the situation of consumer from the East of
Europe. For him, the wealth of capitalism was come too late and even so it
has very specific drawbacks for him. First, this wealth is not available to such
large scale as it is in western part of the old continent. In the West the
continuous economic development, along at least one and a half century,
has produced in the end an acceptable standard of living for a vast majority
of citizens even if this, as we know, it is not available for all. However, in the
Eastern Europe it would be pure and simply much to more to even expect