János Sugár on Thu, 6 Sep 2018 23:29:17 +0200 (CEST)
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<nettime> The End of the Democratic Century
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- To: nettime-l@kein.org
- Subject: <nettime> The End of the Democratic Century
- From: János Sugár <sj@c3.hu>
- Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2018 23:19:32 +0200
Title: The End of the Democratic
Century
The End of the Democratic Century
Autocracy's Global Ascendance
By Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-04-16/end-democratic-century
At the height of World War II, Henry Luce, the founder of Time
magazine, argued that the United States had amassed such wealth and
power that the twentieth century would come to be known simply as
"the American Century." His prediction proved prescient: despite
being challenged for supremacy by Nazi Germany and, later, the Soviet
Union, the United States prevailed against its adversaries. By the
turn of the millennium, its position as the most powerful and
influential state in the world appeared unimpeachable. As a result,
the twentieth century was marked by the dominance not just of a
particular country but also of the political system it helped spread:
liberal democracy.
As democracy flourished across the world, it was tempting to ascribe
its dominance to its inherent appeal. If citizens in India, Italy, or
Venezuela seemed loyal to their political system, it must have been
because they had developed a deep commitment to both individual rights
and collective self-determination. And if Poles and Filipinos began to
make the transition from dictatorship to democracy, it must have been
because they, too, shared in the universal human desire for liberal
democracy.
But the events of the second half of the twentieth century can also be
interpreted in a very different way. Citizens across the world were
attracted to liberal democracy not simply because of its norms and
values but also because it offered the most salient model of economic
and geopolitical success. Civic ideals may have played their part in
converting the citizens of formerly authoritarian regimes into
convinced democrats, but the astounding economic growth of western
Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, the victory of democratic countries in
the Cold War, and the defeat or collapse of democracy's most powerful
autocratic rivals were just as important.
Taking the material foundations of democratic hegemony seriously casts
the story of democracy's greatest successes in a different light, and
it also changes how one thinks about its current crisis. As liberal
democracies have become worse at improving their citizens' living
standards, populist movements that disavow liberalism are emerging
from Brussels to Brasília and from Warsaw to Washington. A striking
number of citizens have started to ascribe less importance to living
in a democracy: whereas two-thirds of Americans above the age of 65
say it is absolutely important to them to live in a democracy, for
example, less than one-third of those below the age of 35 say the same
thing. A growing minority is even open to authoritarian alternatives:
from 1995 to 2017, the share of French, Germans, and Italians who
favored military rule more than tripled.
As recent elections around the world indicate, these opinions aren't
just abstract preferences; they reflect a deep groundswell of
antiestablishment sentiment that can be easily mobilized by extremist
political parties and candidates. As a result, authoritarian populists
who disrespect some of the most basic rules and norms of the
democratic system have made rapid advances across western Europe and
North America over the past two decades. Meanwhile, authoritarian
strongmen are rolling back democratic advances across much of Asia and
eastern Europe. Could the changing balance of economic and military
power in the world help explain these unforeseen developments?
That question is all the more pressing today, as the long-standing
dominance of a set of consolidated democracies with developed
economies and a common alliance structure is coming to an end. Ever
since the last decade of the nineteenth century, the democracies that
formed the West's Cold War alliance against the Soviet Union-in North
America, western Europe, Australasia, and postwar Japan-have commanded
a majority of the world's income. In the late nineteenth century,
established democracies such as the United Kingdom and the United
States made up the bulk of global GDP. In the second half of the
twentieth century, as the geographic span of both democratic rule and
the alliance structure headed by the United States expanded to include
Japan and Germany, the power of this liberal democratic alliance
became even more crushing. But now, for the first time in over a
hundred years, its share of global GDP has fallen below half.
According to forecasts by the International Monetary Fund, it will
slump to a third within the next decade.
At the same time that the dominance of
democracies has faded, the share of economic output coming from
authoritarian states has grown rapidly. In 1990, countries rated
"not free" by Freedom House (the lowest category, which excludes
"partially free" countries such as Singapore) accounted for just 12
percent of global income. Now, they are responsible for 33 percent,
matching the level they achieved in the early 1930s, during the rise
of fascism in Europe, and surpassing the heights they reached in the
Cold War when Soviet power was at its apex.
As a result, the world is now approaching a striking milestone: within
the next five years, the share of global income held by countries
considered "not free"-such as China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia-will
surpass the share held by Western liberal democracies. In the span of
a quarter century, liberal democracies have gone from a position of
unprecedented economic strength to a position of unprecedented
economic weakness.
It is looking less and less likely that the countries in North America
and western Europe that made up the traditional heartland of liberal
democracy can regain their erstwhile supremacy, with their democratic
systems embattled at home and their share of the world economy
continuing to shrink. So the future promises two realistic scenarios:
either some of the most powerful autocratic countries in the world
will transition to liberal democracy, or the period of democratic
dominance that was expected to last forever will prove no more than an
interlude before a new era of struggle between mutually hostile
political systems.
THE WAGES OF WEALTH
Of all the ways in which economic prosperity buys a country power and
influence, perhaps the most important is that it creates stability at
home. As the political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi
have shown, poor democracies often collapse. It is only rich
democracies-those with a GDP per capita above $14,000 in today's
terms, according to their findings-that are reliably secure. Since the
formation of the postwar alliance binding the United States to its
allies in western Europe, no affluent member has experienced a
breakdown of democratic rule.
Beyond keeping democracies stable, economic might also endows them
with a number of tools to influence the development of other
countries. Chief among these is cultural clout. During the apogee of
Western liberal democracy, the United States-and, to a lesser extent,
western Europe-was home to the most famous writers and musicians, the
most watched television shows and movies, the most advanced
industries, and the most prestigious universities. In the minds of
many young people coming of age in Africa or Asia in the 1990s, all
these things seemed to be of a piece: the desire to share in the
unfathomable wealth of the West was also a desire to adopt its
lifestyle, and the desire to adopt its lifestyle seemed to require
emulating its political system.
This combination of economic power and cultural prestige facilitated a
great degree of political influence. When the American soap opera
Dallas began airing in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, for example,
Soviet citizens naturally contrasted the impossible wealth of suburban
America with their own material deprivation and wondered why their
economic system had fallen so far behind. "We were directly or
indirectly responsible for the fall of the [Soviet] empire," Larry
Hagman, one of its leading stars, boasted years later. It was, he
claimed, not Soviet citizens' idealism but rather "good
old-fashioned greed" that "got them to question their
authority."
The economic prowess of Western democracies could also take on a
harder edge. They could influence political events in other countries
by promising to include them in the global economic system or
threatening to exclude them from it. In the 1990s and the first decade
of this century, the prospect of membership in organizations from the
European Union to the World Trade Organization provided powerful
incentives for democratic reforms in eastern Europe, Turkey, and parts
of Asia, including Thailand and South Korea. Meanwhile, Western
sanctions that prevented countries from participating in the global
economy may have helped contain Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the
years following the Gulf War, and they were arguably instrumental in
bringing about the fall of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic after
the war in Kosovo.
Finally, economic power could easily be
converted into military might. This, too, did much to enhance the
global standing of liberal democracies. It ensured that other
countries could not topple democratic regimes by force and raised the
domestic legitimacy of such regimes by making military humiliation a
rarity. At the same time, it encouraged the spread of democracy though
diplomatic leverage and the presence of boots on the ground. Countries
that were physically located between a major democratic power and a
major authoritarian power, such as Poland and Ukraine, were deeply
influenced by the greater material and military benefits offered by an
alliance with the West. Former colonies emulated the political systems
of their erstwhile rulers when they gained independence, leaving
parliamentary democracies from the islands of the Caribbean to the
highlands of East Africa. And in at least two major cases-Germany and
Japan-Western military occupation paved the way for the introduction
of a model democratic constitution.
In short, it is impossible to understand the story of the democratic
century without taking seriously the role that economic power played
in spreading the ideals of liberal democracy around the world. This
also means that it is impossible to make informed predictions about
the future of liberal democracy without reflecting on the effects that
the decline in the relative economic clout of the democratic alliance
might have in the years and decades to come.
THE DANGERS OF DECLINE
At first glance, the conclusion that affluence breeds stability seems
to bode well for the future of North America and western Europe, where
the institutions of liberal democracy have traditionally been most
firmly established. After all, even if their relative power declines,
the absolute level of wealth in Canada or France is very unlikely to
fall below the threshold at which democracies tend to fail. But
absolute levels of wealth may have been just one of many economic
features that kept Western democracies stable after World War II.
Indeed, the stable democracies of that period also shared three other
economic attributes that can plausibly help explain their past
success: relative equality, rapidly growing incomes for most citizens,
and the fact that authoritarian rivals to democracy were much less
wealthy.
All these factors have begun to erode in recent years. Consider what
has happened in the United States. In the 1970s, the top one percent
of income earners commanded eight percent of pretax income; now, they
command over 20 percent. For much of the twentieth century,
inflation-adjusted wages roughly doubled from generation to
generation; for the past 30 years, they have essentially remained
flat. And throughout the Cold War, the U.S. economy, as measured by
GDP based on purchasing power parity, remained two to three times as
large as the Soviet economy; today, it is one-sixth smaller than
China's.
The ability of autocratic regimes to compete with the economic
performance of liberal democracies is a particularly important and
novel development. At the height of its influence, communism managed
to rival the ideological appeal of liberal democracy across large
parts of the developing world. But even then, it offered a weak
economic alternative to capitalism. Indeed, the share of global income
produced by the Soviet Union and its satellite states peaked at 13
percent in the mid-1950s. Over the following decades, it declined
steadily, falling to ten percent by 1989. Communist countries also
could not provide their citizens with a lifestyle that would rival the
comfort of the capitalist West. From 1950 to 1989, per capita income
in the Soviet Union fell from two-thirds to less than half of the
western European level. As the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger
put it, playing off the title of an essay by Lenin, Soviet socialism
proved to be "the highest stage of underdevelopment."
New forms of authoritarian capitalism may eventually suffer similar
types of economic stagnation. So far, however, the form of
authoritarian capitalism that has emerged in Arab Gulf states and East
Asia-combining a strong state with relatively free markets and
reasonably secure property rights-is having a good run. Of the 15
countries in the world with the highest per capita incomes, almost
two-thirds are nondemocracies. Even comparatively unsuccessful
authoritarian states, such as Iran, Kazakhstan, and Russia, can boast
per capita incomes above $20,000. China, whose per capita income was
vastly lower as recently as two decades ago, is rapidly starting to
catch up. Although average incomes in its rural hinterlands remain
low, the country has proved that it can offer a higher level of wealth
in its more urban areas: the coastal region of China now comprises
some 420 million people, with an average income of $23,000 and
growing. In other words, hundreds of millions of people can now be
said to live under conditions of "authoritarian modernity." In the
eyes of their less affluent imitators around the world, their
remarkable prosperity serves as a testament to the fact that the road
to prosperity no longer needs to run through liberal
democracy.
AUTHORITARIAN SOFT POWER
One of the results of this transformation has been a much greater
degree of ideological self-confidence among autocratic regimes-and,
along with it, a willingness to meddle in Western democracies.
Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election
have understandably drawn the most attention over the past two years.
But the country has long had an even greater influence on politics
across western Europe. In Italy and France, for example, Russia has
helped finance extremist parties on both sides of the political divide
for decades. In other European countries, Russia has enjoyed even more
remarkable success in recruiting retired political leaders to lobby on
its behalf, including former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and
former Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer.
The big question now is whether Russia will remain alone in its
attempt to influence the politics of liberal democracies. The answer
is almost certainly no: its campaigns have proved that outside
meddling by authoritarian powers in deeply divided democracies is
relatively easy and strikingly effective, making it very tempting for
Russia's authoritarian peers to follow suit. Indeed, China is already
stepping up ideological pressure on its overseas residents and
establishing influential Confucius Institutes in major centers of
learning. And over the past two years, Saudi Arabia has dramatically
upped its payments to registered U.S. lobbyists, increasing the number
of registered foreign agents working on its behalf from 25 to 145.
If the changing balance of economic and technological power between
Western democracies and authoritarian countries makes the former more
susceptible to outside interference, it also makes it easier for the
latter to spread their values. Indeed, the rise of authoritarian soft
power is already apparent across a variety of domains, including
academia, popular culture, foreign investment, and development aid.
Until a few years ago, for example, all of the world's leading
universities were situated in liberal democracies, but authoritarian
countries are starting to close the gap. According to the latest Times
Higher Education survey, 16 of the world's top 250 institutions can be
found in nondemocracies, including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and
Singapore.
Perhaps the most important form of authoritarian soft power, however,
may be the growing ability of dictatorial regimes to soften the hold
that democracies once enjoyed over the reporting and dissemination of
news. Whereas the Soviet mouthpiece Pravda could never have dreamed of
attracting a mass readership in the United States, the clips produced
today by state-funded news channels, including Qatar's Al Jazeera,
China's CCTV, and Russia's RT, regularly find millions of American
viewers. The result is the end of the West's monopoly over media
narratives, as well as an end to its ability to maintain a civic space
untainted by foreign governments.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END?
During the long period of democratic stability, the United States was
the dominant superpower, both culturally and economically.
Authoritarian competitors such as the Soviet Union quickly stagnated
economically and became discredited ideologically. As a result,
democracy seemed to promise not only a greater degree of individual
freedom and collective self-determination but also the more prosaic
prospect of a vastly wealthier life. As long as these background
conditions held, there seemed to be good reason to assume that
democracy would continue to be safe in its traditional strongholds.
There were even plausible grounds to hope that an ever-growing number
of autocratic countries would join the democratic column.
But the era in which Western liberal democracies were the world's top
cultural and economic powers may now be drawing to a close. At the
same time that liberal democracies are showing strong signs of
institutional decay, authoritarian populists are starting to develop
an ideological alternative in the form of illiberal democracy, and
outright autocrats are offering their citizens a standard of living
that increasingly rivals that of the richest countries in the
West.
It is tempting to hope that Western liberal
democracies could regain their dominance. One path toward that end
would be economic. The recent economic success of authoritarian
countries could prove to be short lived. Russia and Saudi Arabia
remain overly reliant on income from fossil fuels. China's recent
growth has been fueled by a soaring debt bubble and favorable
demographics, and it may end up being difficult to sustain once the
country is forced to deleverage and the effects of an aging population
hit home. At the same time, the economic performance of developed
Western economies could improve. As the residual effects of the Great
Recession wear off and European and North American economies roar back
to life, these bastions of liberal democracy could once again outpace
the modernized autocracies.
Projections about the exact speed and degree of the shifting power
balance between democratic and authoritarian countries should
therefore be taken with a large grain of salt. And yet a cursory
glance at Western GDP growth rates for the past three to four decades
shows that, due to demographic decline and low productivity growth,
Western economies were stagnating long before the financial crisis.
Meanwhile, China and many other emerging economies have large
hinterlands that have yet to experience catch-up development, which
suggests that these countries can continue to make considerable gains
by following their current growth model.
Another hope is that emerging democracies such as Brazil, India, and
Indonesia may come to play a more active role in upholding an alliance
of liberal democracies and diffusing their values around the world.
But this would require a radical change in course. As the political
scientist Marc Plattner has argued, these countries have not
historically thought of "the defense of liberal democracy as a
significant component of their foreign policies." Following the
Russian annexation of Crimea, for example, Brazil, India, and South
Africa abstained from voting on a resolution in the UN General
Assembly that condemned the move. They have also opposed sanctions
against Russia. And they have tended to side with autocratic regimes
in seeking a greater role for states in regulating the Internet.
To make things worse, emerging democracies have historically been much
less stable than the supposedly consolidated democracies of North
America, western Europe, and parts of East Asia. Indeed, recent
democratic backsliding in Turkey, as well as signs of democratic
slippage in Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines, raises
the possibility that some of these countries may become flawed
democracies-or revert to outright authoritarian rule-in the coming
decades. Instead of shoring up the dwindling forces of democracy, some
of these countries may choose to align with autocratic powers.
Hopes that the current set of democratic countries could somehow
regain their erstwhile global position are probably vain. The most
likely scenario, then, is that democracies will come to look less and
less attractive as they cease to be associated with wealth and power
and fail to address their own challenges.
It's conceivable, however, that the animating principles of liberal
democracy will prove deeply appealing to the inhabitants of
authoritarian countries even once those peoples enjoy a comparable
standard of living. If large authoritarian countries such as Iran,
Russia, and Saudi Arabia undertook democratic reforms, the aggregate
power of democracies would be boosted significantly. If China were to
do so, it would end the era of authoritarian resurgence in a single
stroke.
But that is just another way of saying that the long century during
which Western liberal democracies dominated the globe has ended for
good. The only remaining question now is whether democracy will
transcend its once firm anchoring in the West, a shift that would
create the conditions for a truly global democratic century-or whether
democracy will become, at best, the lingering form of government in an
economically and demographically declining corner of the
world.
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