China & Russia – Are autocracies stable in market-based systems?

[nerdgirl 0]

And if they are, what is the impact for US foreign policy?

One of the arguments of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History was that democracy and market capitalism (“liberal democracy”) prevailed at the end of the 20th Century as the clear winner across the planet as the best political and economic over any of the alternatives. One might say Fukuyama argued that it was the ‘clear winner’:

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Fukuyama got a lot of criticism with the rise of radical Islamists terrorism and attacks on the US of September 11th. He’s now getting criticism from another perspective.

Robert Kagan recently published his rejoinder to Fukuyama: The Return of History and the End of Dreams in which he proposes

“Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence.”

(Btw: Kagan co-founded the neoconservative Project for a Pew American Century [PNAC] and advises Sen McCain.)

With the spotlight of attention on Beijing from the Olympics and Russia with the conflict in South Ossetia/Georgia, the reality that a Fukuyama-style vision may not have happened … at least not yet … is being brought to the attention of the world. China & Russia are both capitalist systems, state-based and oligarchic, respectively. They’re not liberal democracies, but they are capitalist market economies, albeit one in which a narrow elite controls large scale political-economic decisions.

The Russian Col-Gen making noises about nuclear attack may be seen as an example of return to rhetoric and great powers in competition. Calling it a “return to Cold War” is imprecise, inaccurate, and … well, intellectually lazy, im-ever-ho … altho’ there may be many who still see the world through Fulda-Gap colored glasses (i.e., ‘unreformed’ Soviet specialists/scholars). Cold War was a bipolar world of competition between 2 great powers, the US and the USSR; the latter doesn’t exist and there are other competitors. The Cold War was about fundamentally clashing ideologies – Russia & China have hunt-n-pecked what they want from liberal democratic economics adapting to their own systems. (The conflict with radical Islamist extremists is much more about ideologies.)

Authoritarian or autocratic powers – of which I consider both Putin’s Russia and China – are traditionally seen as less stable because transfer of power is often messy, brutal, and bloody. And power is concentrated in the hands of the few. Autocracies were not seen as able to maintain power (stability) under the liberalizing influence of capitalism. (And that’s “liberal” in the classical economics/philosophy sense not US partisan politics.) This is a core tenet of the argument for expansion of liberal democracies.

US foreign policy for decades has been based on the oft unwritten idea that liberal market-based economic systems are better and that it is in the US interest to advance such systems. (E.g., communism is bad and limiting the advance of communism is in the US interest … [vortexring]: also may be interesting intersections with Klein’s Shock Doctrine thesis.)

VR/Marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[billvon 3,120]

>They’re not liberal democracies, but they are capitalist market economies,
>albeit one in which a narrow elite controls large scale political-economic
>decisions.

I would argue that the US has the sort of capitalist market economy you describe in the last part of your sentence. In our case the elite include captains of industry along with political leaders, but they are just as narrow an elite - and they wield just as much power.

[jcd11235 0]

Quote

>They’re not liberal democracies, but they are capitalist market economies,
>albeit one in which a narrow elite controls large scale political-economic
>decisions.

I would argue that the US has the sort of capitalist market economy you describe in the last part of your sentence. In our case the elite include captains of industry along with political leaders, but they are just as narrow an elite - and they wield just as much power.

I was thinking the same thing as I read that passage.

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