Posted on 05/01/2008 7:06:53 AM PDT by forkinsocket
With the fall of communism and the rise of globalisation in the 1990s, the West believed democracy had won. How wrong it was, says the neocon and foreign policy adviser to John McCain. He warns the forces of freedom are losing ground as the autocracies of Russia and China reassert themselves as world powers
In recent years, as the great autocracies of Russia and China have risen and the radical Islamists have waged their struggle, the liberal world has been divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. The great democracies have squabbled and jostled for the moral high ground, debated the fine points of international law, argued the relative merits of hard and soft power and commented endlessly on each other’s moral and ethical failings.
These arguments were affordable luxuries in an imagined era of international harmony, but not in the time of troubles that the world has actually entered. History has returned and the peoples of the liberal world need to choose to shape it or let others shape it for them.
In the early 1990s optimism was understandable. In a globalised economy, it was widely believed, nations had no choice but to liberalise, first economically, then politically, if they wanted to compete and survive. Their citizens would seek prosperity and comfort and abandon the atavistic passions, the struggles for honour and glory, and the tribal hatreds that had produced conflict throughout history. In the battle of ideas, liberalism had triumphed. As Francis Fukuyama famously put it: “At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy.”
The world was not witnessing a transformation, however, merely a pause in the endless competition of nations and peoples. Nationalism, far from being weakened by globalisation, has now returned with a vengeance. Furthermore, growing national wealth and autocracy have proven compatible, after all. Autocrats learn and adjust. The autocracies of Russia and China have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity. They have seen that people making money will keep their noses out of politics, especially if they know their noses will be cut off.
A majority of Russians seem content with autocratic rule. Unlike the tumultuous democracy of the 1990s, the present government has at least produced a rising standard of living. President Putin’s efforts to undo the humiliating postcold war settlement and restore the greatness of Russia is popular. His political advisers believe that “avenging the demise of the Soviet Union will keep us in power”.
The Chinese learnt from the Soviet experience, too. While the liberal world waited after Tiananmen Square for China to resume its inevitable course towards liberal democratic modernity, the Communist party leadership set about shoring up its dominance in the nation. Keen observers of the Chinese political system see a sufficient combination of competence and ruthlessness on the part of the Chinese leadership to handle problems as they arise and a populace prepared to accept autocratic government so long as economic growth continues.
In the long run, rising prosperity may well produce political liberalism, but how long is the long run? It may be too long to have any strategic or geopolitical relevance. As the old joke goes, Germany launched itself on a trajectory of economic modernisation in the late 19th century and within six decades became a fully fledged democracy. The only problem was what happened in the intervening years.
So the world waits for change, but in the meantime two of the world’s largest nations, Russia and China, with more than 1.5 billion people and the second and third largest militaries between them, have governments committed to autocratic rule and may be able to sustain themselves in power for the foreseeable future.
This is going to shape the international system in profound ways. The world is not about to embark on an ideological struggle of the kind that dominated the cold war. But the new era, rather than being a time of “universal values”, will be one of growing tensions and sometimes confrontation between the forces of liberal democracy and those of autocracy.
The presumption over the past decade has been that when Chinese and Russian leaders stopped believing in communism, they stopped believing in anything. They had become pragmatists, without ideology or belief, simply pursuing their own and their nation’s interests. But the rulers of China and Russia, like the rulers of autocracies in the past, do have a set of beliefs that guide them in both domestic and foreign policy.
They believe in the virtues of a strong central government and disdain the weaknesses of the democratic system. They believe their large and fractious nations need order and stability to prosper. They believe the vacillations and chaos of democracy would impoverish and shatter their nations and in the case of Russia already did so. They believe that strong rule at home is necessary if their nations are to be strong and respected in the world, capable of safeguarding and advancing their interests.
Chinese and Russian leaders are not just autocrats, therefore. They actually believe in autocracy. By providing order, by producing economic success, by holding their nations together and leading them to a position of international influence, respectability and power, they believe they are serving their people. Nor is it at all clear, for the moment, that the majority of people they rule in either China or Russia disagree.
For all their growing wealth and influence, however, the 21st-century autocracies are a minority in the world. The postcold war landscape looks very different when seen from autocratic Beijing and Moscow than it does from democratic Washington, London, Paris, Berlin or Brussels.
In the 1990s the liberal world led by the United States toppled autocratic governments in Panama and Haiti and made war against Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia twice. International nongovernmental organisations, well funded by western governments, trained opposition parties and supported electoral reforms in central and eastern Europe and in central Asia. In 2000 internationally financed opposition forces and international election monitors finally brought down Milosevic. Within a year he was shipped off to the Hague and five years later he was dead in prison.
From 2003 to 2005, western democratic countries and NGOs provided pro-western and pro-democratic parties and politicians the financing and organisational help that allowed them to topple other autocrats in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Lebanon.
Europeans and Americans saw in these revolutions the natural unfolding of humanity’s destined political evolution towards liberal democracy. Leaders in Beijing and Moscow saw them in geopolitical terms as western-funded, CIA-inspired coups that furthered the hegemony of America and its European allies.
The upheavals in Ukraine and Georgia further poisoned the Rus-sian-western relationship and helped persuade the Kremlin to complete its turnaround in foreign policy.
Putin feared the examples of Ukraine and Georgia could be repeated in Russia. They convinced him by 2006 to control, restrict and in some cases close down the activities of international NGOs. His worries may seem absurd, or disingenuous, but they are not misplaced. In the postcold war era, a triumphant liberalism has sought to expand its triumph by establishing as an international principle the right of the “international community” to intervene against sovereign states that abuse the rights of their people.
International NGOs interfere in domestic politics; international bodies like the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitor and pass judgment on elections; international legal experts talk about modifying international law to include such novel concepts as “the responsibility to protect” or a “voluntary sovereignty waiver”. In theory, these innovations apply to everyone. In practice, they chiefly provide liberal nations with the right to intervene in the affairs of nonliberal nations.
This has become one of the great schisms in the international system. For three centuries international law, with its strictures against interference in the internal affairs of nations, has tended to protect autocracies. Now the liberal world is in the process of removing that protection, while the autocrats rush to defend the principle of sovereign inviolability.
The war in Kosovo in 1999 was a more disturbing turning point for Russia and China than the Iraq war of 2003. Both opposed Nato’s intervention and not only because China’s embassy was bombed by an American warplane and Russia’s distant Slavic cousins in Serbia were on the receiving end of the Nato onslaught.
When Russia threatened to block military action at the UN security council, Nato simply sidestepped the UN and took it upon itself to author-ise action, thus negating one of Russia’s few tools of international influence. Years later Putin was still insisting that the western nations “leave behind this disdain for international law” and not attempt to “substitute Nato or the EU for the UN”.
The Russians and Chinese were on solid ground legally. At the time, no less an authority than Henry Kissinger warned that “the abrupt abandonment of the concept of national sovereignty” risked a world unmoored from any notion of international legal order. The United States, of course, paid this little heed – it had intervened and overthrown sovereign governments dozens of times throughout its history. But even postmodern Europe set aside legal niceties in the interest of what it regarded as a higher morality.
The conflict between international law and liberal morality is one that the liberal democracies have not been able to finesse. As Chinese officials asked at the time of Tiananmen Square and have continued to ask: “What right does the US government have to . . . flagrantly interfere in China’s internal affairs?”
What right, indeed? Only the liberal creed grants the right, the belief that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights that must not be abridged by governments, that governments derive their power and legitimacy only from the consent of the governed and have a duty to protect their citizens’ right to life, liberty and property.
To those who share this liberal faith, foreign policies and even wars that defend these principles, as in Kosovo, can be right even if established international law says they are wrong. But to the Chinese, Russians and others who do not share this world view, the United States and its democratic allies succeed in imposing their views on others not because they are right but because they are powerful enough to do so. To nonliberals, the international liberal order is not progress. It is oppression.
This is more than a dispute over theory and the niceties of international jurisprudence. It concerns the fundamental legitimacy of governments, which for autocrats can be a matter of life and death. China’s rulers haven’t forgotten that if the liberal democratic world had had its way after the events at Tienanman Square in 1989, they would now be out of office, possibly imprisoned or worse.
American and European policy-makers constantly say they want Russia and China to integrate themselves into the international liberal order, but it is not surprising if Russian and Chinese leaders are wary. Can autocrats enter the liberal international order without succumbing to the forces of liberalism?
Afraid of the answer, the autocracies are understandably pushing back and with some effect. Rather than accept the new principles of diminished sovereignty and weakened international protection for autocrats, Russia and China are trying to promote an international order that places a high value on national sovereignty and can protect autocratic governments from foreign interference.
Russia and China need to make the world safer for autocracy. They are succeeding, as one would expect. They may no longer actively export an ideology, but they can and do offer autocrats somewhere to run to when the liberal democracies turn hostile. The Chinese provide unfettered aid to dictatorships in Africa and Asia., undermining the “international community’s” efforts to press for reforms – which in practical terms often means regime change – in countries such as Burma and Zimbabwe. Russia’s model of “sovereign democracy” is attractive among the autocrats of central Asia.
In fact, a global competition is under way. According to Russia’s foreign minister, “for the first time in many years, a real competitive environment has emerged on the market of ideas” between different “value systems and development models”. And the good news, from the Russian point of view, is that “the West is losing its monopoly on the globalisation process”.
This competition is not quite the cold war redux. But it is worth contemplating what the world would look like, what Europe would look like, if democratic movements in Ukraine and Georgia failed or were forcefully suppressed and the two nations became autocracies with close ties to Moscow. It is worth considering what the effect would be on east Asia if China used force to quash a democratic system in Taiwan and install a friendlier autocracy in its place.
It may not come to war, but the global competition between liberal and autocratic governments will likely intensify in coming years. The future international order will be shaped by those who have the power and the collective will to shape it. The question is whether the world’s liberal democracies will again rise to that challenge.
Some good points, except for the "liberal" use of the word "liberal". It is liberalism that is destroying our democratically elected representative Republic. It is Liberalism that promotes "tribalism", which is destroying our democratically elected representative Republic.
Quit trying to be a liberal McCain, then you might actually be usefull. But as long as you embrace liberalism, you will continue to destroy this nation.
m-m-m...do we now use the word “liberal” instead of “free”?
Points out how complex the world is and confirms that I’d rather have Mccain (with all his warts) then Obmama...as POTUS
I know the dogma around here is that people prefer democracy (or a republican form of government), but the truth is that people don't really care what form of government is in place at the national level as long as they are free to trade, worship, and live their everyday lives as they please. At the city and county level, people do prefer a say in government, but only to the extent that government influences everyday life.
Besides, every city in America is run (overtly or covertly) by four or five big families anyway. Some people are just born with a talent for governing, and this talent tends to run in families. (In our city, for example, the V_________ family has been involved in running the show in one form or another for sixty-plus years, and most people are fine with that, because they do a fairly good job of it.) People born with this ability tend to rise to the levels of power of whatever community they inhabit, and tend to do what's best for the community out of a sense of noblesse oblige. Such families represent a natural aristocracy, and without them, most communities would be chaotic.
The city of Dallas is a perfect example. Over the first 120 years or so of its existence, the city was dominated by an unelected power group of wealthy merchants, landowners, and industrial leaders, and things ran fairly smoothly. During this time, the city had an elected government, of course — a government composed of various candidates carefully groomed by the power group to take these positions. The shadow government was not perfect, nor was it always run for the benefit of all, but under its benevolent tyranny the city thrived and grew, and most of its citizens prospered.
But beginning in the 1960s this tidy system began to be undermined. Due to legal pressures and societal changes, a genuine democracy began to rise in Dallas, and the aging (and now mostly suburban) members of the power elite decided to quietly and gradually surrender their control of the city rather than risk the plunging the city into the chaos that gripped cities such as LA, Detroit, and Chicago. This is why there were never any race riots or integration-related violence in Dallas: the Powers That Be simply decreed that Dallas would integrate, democratize, and desegregate, and it was so. By keeping the peace, the Power Elite made sure Dallas remained an attractive haven for business; unfortunately, by surrendering power, the monopolar rule of the “old money” tribe was replaced by a multipolar battle for power between the natural leaders of the city's various ethnic tribes. Dallas today is exquisitely democratic, representational, and a big frigging mess. The exurbs, which are now run by their own Power Elites, are where the economic action is.
The lesson here is that representative government, where it works at all, works only at the scale of a city-state like Athens, and even then only when it is dominated by a natural aristocracy. Democracy does not scale well; a state or nation run by democratic principles will sooner or later devolve into chaos, as self-interested groups of all types battle each other for control. One need only look at Dallas — or the former Yugoslavia — for proof of that thesis.
Wrong. US sovereignty and national strategic interests grant the right. Nobody can tell the USA what to do because we are not constrained by some imaginary "international law." That means nobody can stop us from interfering with their affairs for our own purposes.
didn’t know that....always heard Reagan talk about “free” countries..not “liberal” countries.......
He’s using liberal in the classical sense; in which all the founding fathers were ‘liberal’ as compared to the autocracies of Europe.
If ever a mortal needed to be resurrected...
Oh really? Do you honestly believe that? If please explain why the past four administrations are working 24/7 to get the globalized socialistic new world order into place. We have the World Court, World Bank, World Health Organization, World Environmental Organization, WIPO - World Intellectual Property Organization, World Meteorological Organization (WMO), World Travel & Tourism Council, WHO, The World Health Organization, World Energy Council, World Medical Association, World Aquaculture Society, World Coal Institute, World Federation of Exchanges, on and on and it’s all watched carefully by the United Nations.
We have a veto in the United Nations. They can’t do anything without our permission.
No, you're wrong. The question you're avoiding is the "why" of our international actions over the past 100 years or so. They've very often been undertaken for fundamentally moral, rather than self-interested reasons -- making the world safe for democracy; helping people win or retain their freedom, etc. We're a very idealistic nation.
Kagan didn't go into it, but to truly understand why the Chinese might favor central autocracy, one must look at their long, ugly history of warlordism and the regional wars that accompanied it. Russia's past has also created a culture that favors autocratic structures.
My real complaint about this article is that he starts out mentioning Islamofascism, but never discusses it. Russian and especially Chinese autocracy is probably dangerous long-term, but the real near-term danger comes from the "ideological dictators," such as infest Iran. They, like the Nazis and Communists of the last century, are going to be the ones who foment actual war.
False. Humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. We didn’t go to World War II to save the Jews or make the world safe for democracy, and we accomplished neither of those things. We let the Jews be exterminated and helped Soviet Communism take over most of Europe. We didn’t attack Iraq to spread democracy, we did it to destroy our enemy Saddam Hussein. Mission Accomplished.
That's because you fail to think beyond slogans.
We're not talking about "humanitarian war," we're talking about Kagan's point, which is that we must consider what motivates people or nations undertake certain things.
Our motives are far different from those of the Russians and Chinese. They see the world through a belief in authoritarian structures; while we think more in terms of idealistic principles such as liberty, unalienable rights, and so on.
I think we understand the motives of the Islamofascists a whole lot better than we do those of the Chinese or Russians.
385 to 1. Joining the UN was the dumbest thing we ever did. To think that they are going to be the leaders one of these days makes me sick. To see Bush push for the LOST Treaty made me sick. I am beginning to hate that man and that says a lot.
I think we act in our own interests, the moral justification comes after the fact. We didn't invade Iraq to liberate the Iraqis. We liberated them because we were advancing the cause of our own national security.
You seem to think that we can effectively deal with people or nations without taking the time to understand how they will respond to various moves that we might make.
Sure, one can act on that basis. But it's a swell way to do really stupid things.
Tailgunner Joe subscribes to a very simplistic version of the “might makes right” school of thought, as in who cares what everyone else thinks, screw them as long as its good for us. The Russians and the Chinese are of similar thought in that they believe power and interest trumps principle and they also happen believe that the U.S. operates the same way, though with a tasty frosty sugar coating of peace, democracy, freedom, etc.
Sometimes peace and democracy are in America’s interests and sometimes war and dictatorship are in our interests. Why haven’t we brought democracy to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Because we don’t want to.
Not quite true.
The U.S. hasn’t destabilized and overthrown the present Saudi and Pakistani governments because it doesn’t want to.
The U.S. hasn’t brough democracy to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because it can’t.
I knew you’d say that. Of course we can, but we don’t want to. We don’t want Musharraf and the Saudis overthrown because that’s exactly what the terrorists we are fighting want. We don’t want those countries to have democracy because the people of those nations hate us and would elect terrorists like the Palestinians elected HAMAS.
“Wrong. US sovereignty and national strategic interests grant the right. Nobody can tell the USA what to do because we are not constrained by some imaginary “international law.” That means nobody can stop us from interfering with their affairs for our own purposes.”
The corollory therefore, is that THEY have a perfect right to interfere in YOUR affairs for their own purposes. Not a principle I would care to see enshrined.
Besides, the USA is constrained by international law, inasmuch as you signed up to those international agreements. To break those agreements is akin to making a contract and then tearing it up when it becomes inconvenient.
The simple fact is that no nation can exist in isolation, foreign lands do exist and often have things that you want, and therefore you have to deal with them. The general public prefers a simple world with “goodies” and “baddies”, and for the US to always back the “goodies”. But the national interest of the USA mean that sometimes you have to support the “baddies”. I am reminded of the US president (can’t remember who it was now) who was visiting some banana republic in South America. One of his aides informed him that the “el Presidente” he had just shook hands with was a multiple murderer who ruthlessly crushed all democracy, was involved in torture and drug-running and all manner of other evils. Your president looked him in the eye and said “Son, that man is an S.O.B. But he’s OUR S.O.B.!”
This is the grim reality of international power politics.
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