Glasshouse Forum in the media

2008-11-04:

Translation of an article by Kay Glans, editorial coordinator of Glasshouse Forum, in Sweden's largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter:

At present, as the USA is going to the polls, it is happening against the background of a new world picture. Not only the financial crisis, but also the global change of the past decade has fundamentally altered the rules of the game. Kay Glans reports on the paradigmatic shift in the international debate.

I interviewed Robert Kagan in 2003. With his book Of Paradise and Power he had become a noteworthy interpreter of the self-understanding of the American superpower. Then it appeared that nothing could dislodge the USA’s hegemonic position. I pointed out that we could nevertheless be fairly certain that the future would not follow the straight line that we were projecting from the present – something always happens to surprise us. He agreed in principle – “something happens” – but could not come up with anything that might be able to upset American dominance.

Five years later something has happened. The limitations of American military power have become obvious. Whilst the USA was focusing on the war on terror, China has, undisturbed, been able to consolidate its position in what more and more obviously is standing out as a multipolar world order.

There is also something that has not happened. In his essay “The End of History?” (1989) political scientist Francis Fukuyama claimed that there were no longer any rivals to the democratic capitalist society, and that all countries would converge onto this system. This has become a widespread perception, which has been reiterated for almost 20 years. During this time the Chinese economy has forged ahead by leaps and bounds, but the Communist Party has retained its grip. Russia has become stronger and more authoritarian.

Kagan’s new book The Return of History and the End of Dreams (2008) is in large part a justified showdown with “Fukuyamaism”. Instead of convergence we have a great power rivalry that is reminiscent of the period before the First World War. China and Russia will continue to be authoritarian for the foreseeable future. Globalisation does not moderate nationalism; trade does not moderate antagonism. Kagan admittedly does not preclude the idea that economic change leads to democracy, but in that case it is taking longer than people had hoped. He calls to mind what people say about Germany: it began to be modernised at the end of the 19th century and was a stable democracy 60 years later. The problem is, of course, everything that happened in between.

It is in the nature of superpowers to compete and to try to expand their influence, says Kagan; instead of cultivating illusions the democratic states have to unite to form a common front against authoritarian superpowers. But he ignores the fact that one tangible risk in such a project – apart from the fact that a number of democracies do not want to participate – is that it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we maintain dogmatically that China and Russia will continue to be authoritarian, the probability will increase that they will continue to be so.

Nor is the USA’s position as leader of the world’s democracies completely uncontested. The current crisis means not only that the USA’s economic power is reduced, but also that Anglo-Saxon capitalism is losing its position as a lodestar. There has been a widespread notion that other countries will be forced to emulate its weaker government, greater income differentials and relatively small welfare state. It becomes more difficult to adduce this as an ideal now that the American state has massively intervened to save the financial sector, and when income differentials are on their way to losing their legitimacy also in the USA.

A re-evaluation of the relationship between state and market has been on its way for a while, not least occasioned by developments in China. 10 years ago its state-run companies were in deep crisis; today several of them are successful global actors.

In his recently published book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (2008) Yasheng Huang, professor at MIT, claims that people have overestimated the significance of entrepreneurship in China. The state has had a driving role and it has become increasingly manifest. This primarily inspires development economies, but will also affect the view of the state held in the West.

It is no exaggeration to claim that we find ourselves in a political paradigmatic shift. Since the end of 1970s deregulation and rolling back the state has been the dominant idea, towards which other people have had to position themselves. Now that the state is back on track, pushed on by precisely those market forces which were supposed to make it redundant, this catalyses a general re-evaluation of its role. The financial crisis is not the only source. In Nudge. Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (2008), Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein summarize the findings of behavioural science in order to show how bad we are at exploiting our options. Individuals need the support of “choice architecture”, which does not prohibit but encourages certain behaviours, and where the state has a central role. Thaler and Sunstein advocate a paternalism, albeit one that they describe as libertarian, as it does not work with coercion. It is, nevertheless, control, and it presupposes that you adopt an attitude that certain behaviours and outcomes are desirable. A new kind of guardianship? Well, in this case it is most often not a question of interventions into protected areas. Commercial interests are already affecting us hugely. All neo-liberalism has to say about this is that everyone has to make their own choice, and this appears more and more to be a lack of thought or apathy which is becoming stylized into idealism.

In his last fight the Swedish boxer Ingemar Johansson was knocked out but saved by the bell. The newspaper placards have become classic: “Wake up Ingo! You won!” Today one is tempted to say: “Wake up Left, you’ve won!” There is a great deal to indicate that we are on our way into a new move to the Left: the faith in market solutions has declined; the dissatisfaction with the unequal distribution of wealth is growing.

Nevertheless the Left is not particularly alert. One reason is probably that, like Ingo, they are still a bit groggy after having been floored. A large part of the more recent ideological flora of Left has consisted of adaptation to the idea of the primacy of the market. Instead of attempting to mould society they have offered resistance to an abstract Empire and claimed to be pursuing a low-intensity guerrilla war at the periphery. In particular the academic Left seems to have felt quite comfortable on this margin; the greatest risk you take if you lead a rebellion in the reading room is that the librarian asks you to keep quiet.

Also contributing to the Left’s inability to act is the fact that it is so calibrated to criticise the European tradition that it has difficulty in perceiving the change that is on its way. Those people who have felt stifled by Eurocentrism can perhaps breathe out when the world’s centre of gravity moves towards Asia. You should, as is well known, be careful about what you wish for as this can come true. Other cultures also have repressive components, and there are not always equally strong counterweights to them as in the European tradition. In China people talk increasingly about not imitating the West but developing their own model, based on the Confucian tradition. This can breed conservatism and nationalism in the West too.

Through its rejection of the universalism of the Enlightenment the Left has rendered itself defenceless against a development of this kind. Praising the particular was relatively harmless as long as the world, driven by economics and technology, expanded and was growing together. If globalisation is now impeded or even rolled back, as has happened previously in history, then this anti-universalism will have other consequences. The nation will become even more central as an actor and arena for equalisation policies if internationalisation appears to be destabilising and threatening. It does not need to be what we usually mean by the Left which proves to be the most skilful in picking up the concern, but instead National Socialisms, which combines collective demarcations with equalisation policy. National Socialisms do not necessarily have to be ethnocentric or racist, but the risk of this is imminent. Hitler’s National Socialism was a very extreme variant, intimately associated with the huge catastrophe of the First World War – but it may be worth remembering that it was a National Socialism which took the initiative in the interwar years. Then, too, both socialism and capitalism appeared discredited in the eyes of major population groups. As Mark Twain said: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Read the original version in Swedish here.