Ping. Good article.
Our political philosophers imagine a grand historical dialectic, in which the battle of worldviews over the centuries produces, in the end, the correct liberal democratic answer.
"Our political philosophers" is, of course, Fukuyama, and his treatment of the whole thing was entirely Hegelian. Hegel seems to have acqured a nearly cult status on campus that is loosely related to his part in Marxian historiography. A minor point - Fukuyama, of course, is no Marxist.
It seems clear that forms of government and the ideologies they follow are two very separate arenas. One might have a relatively benign autocracy, for example, the sort of an arrangement that Edmund Burke cautioned against overthrowing with insufficient reason. One might have a less benign one, even a police state. This is a separate issue from ideology. One sees two ironies here - first the irony of Marx, who promised democracy and delivered the autocracy of the Party in practice. Second, the irony of Khomeini, whose religion the 1400 years ago of his fondest memory contained no ayatollahs whatever. In Mohammed's day it was in a theological sense intensely democratic, and what that religion has delivered both in Shi'ism and Sunni practice is a militant autocracy.
There are classic problems with autocracy, the most prominent being the problem of succession. This caused bloody warfare in the Roman and Chinese empires, and in nearly every one of the rest. The classical solution to this problem is to involve some sort of hereditary relationship - "keeping it in the family" keeps the money with the power and interlopers out. At least that moves the theater of engagement to between families at best, and where not, chaos. Rome never really did figure that one out.
The notion of an organized international community that possesses some sort of meta-right over the sovereignty of its constituent citizens and states is one that has never really been examined to completion. Not, at least, beyond a gooey sighing of "Wouldn't it be nice?" In fact, it isn't. The vehicles of international "democracy" have proven unaccountable to their constituent peoples, arrogant, lazy, corrupt and ineffectual. Far from theorizing about what right they have to interfere with the affairs of their sundry states, one wonders what right, beyond a sinecure for an aspiring international governing class, they have even to exist? But certain "autocratic" concerns that they have become a vehicle for interference in interal affairs belie the fact that they have done no such thing in application, as Darfur reminds us.
"As China's Li Peng told Iran's Rafsanjani, China and Iran are united by a common desire to build a world order in which "the selection of whatever social system by a country is the affair of the people of that country."
That is nonsense, of course, but a tribute to Enlightment terminology that even Marx never kicked. The point of an autocracy is the the people of the country do not get to decide. They might well choose it if the alternative is chaos, starvation, or incessant warfare, all of which can be arranged. Mugabe, anyone?
There are broad historical currents being paddled about in canoes here. Autocracy took a major hit in the year 1917, when the Hohenzollern, Romanov, Ottoman, and Habsburg dynasties fell in the course of a single year. Even those of us who do not subscribe to an Hegelian historical dialectic must take pause in the face of this sort of change. Autocracy is obviously not dead, but it no longer dominates. Why is the topic of a much longer dissertation than this, but it's so. That was not, incidentally, the end of the associated Great Powers geopolitical alignment, far from it. Those also are separate arenas.
I have mocked the French in particular for a nostalgic desire to return to the days of the Great Powers, wherein all decisions of any import were undertaken in luxurious salons peopled by Europe's aristocracy. One sees the return of autocratic government, yes, but any Great Powers configuration within world geopolitics is going to either have to account for the asymmetrical power still wielded by the United States and its democratic allies, or wait for its highly-touted but rather exaggerated demise. In short, Russia and China are free to pursue their respective national interests, but when did they not? There is nothing new here.
As for Russia and China, it will be tempting for them to enjoy the spectacle of the United States bogged down in a fight with Al Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups in the Middle East and South Asia...
...but disturbing should we win it without their perceived help, and hence we may well see just such a thing attempted as victory in Iraq becomes undeniable...
...just as it is tempting to let American power in that region be checked by a nuclear-armed Iran. The willingness of the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing to protect their fellow autocrats in Pyongyang, Tehran, and Khartoum increases the chances that the connection between terrorists and nuclear weapons will eventually be made.
At some point - and this is especially true under the Great Powers paradigm - these governments are going to figure out who is really threatened as opposed to the rhetoric; i.e., who is within nuclear missle range and who is not. That is a pragmatic, non-ideological decision, and on that level of geopolitics there are no friends, only temporary allies with permanent weaponry. Who is really being hurt here? And why does no one seem to want to talk about that?
But enough of that. It seems clear that both of these autocratic governments are feeling heat from an ideological foe in Islamism. It may be what it will take to get Russia and China to be serious about this one is to point out that their own self-interest is at stake, not simply U.S. prestige. And that is the other limitation to the "keep the world safe for fellow autocrats" approach to international relations - they tend to be hungry, and are prone to acting as if "there can be only one." A thing to ponder when thinking about 1917.
All IMHO and subject to furious debate as usual, of course...