MISSION STATEMENT WORK PROCEDURE ORGANISATION CONTACTS

PROJECTS 2008/2009:

THE RETURN OF THE CAPITALIST-AUTHORITARIAN GREAT POWERS

GLOBALISATION AND THE MIDDLE CLASS IN THE WEST

Publications - The return of the capitalist-authoritarian great powers.

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Publications: The return of the capitalist-authoritarian great powers.

Preface to the publication series

What is the relationship between liberal democracy and capitalism? Experience with communism shows that democracy needs some sort of market economy as its basis. Does this also mean that capitalism needs liberal democracy?

After the peaceful victory of the liberal democracies over the communist dictatorships many people have drawn the conclusion that societies that do not develop liberal democracies in the long term are doomed to economic and technological stagnation. The ongoing development in states such as Russia and China may, of course, involve major complications and crises, but ultimately time is working for democracy. As regards China for example, there are, according to this view, two possibilities, both manageable by the West. In order to become a superpower China has to democratise, which means that the country must become an economic competitor but not a global political rival of the West. If China remains authoritarian, it will not become a superpower, and for this reason not a challenger to the West.

This conviction has come to be called “fukuyamaism”, from the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay “The End of History?”. (This is not quite fair, because Fukuyama by no means rules out the fact that liberal society in the future might be challenged by authoritarian and totalitarian movements.) Fukuyamaism does exclude a third relationship between the market economy and democracy, that states can be and may remain authoritarian and nevertheless economically highly developed. Yet it is this precise possibility which is beginning to look more likely as regards China and Russia, and people have, therefore, now begun to talk about the return of history (see for example “The Return of History and the End of Dreams” by Robert Kagan).

If this is the case, it will have major consequences for the global political order and for the political climate in general. If China achieves the status as a model of an alternative modernity, this will affect not merely the developing countries. Contemporary capitalism is good at creating prosperity, but not at distributing it (see the Glasshouse Forum project “Globalisation and the middle class in the West”). There are signs that a legitimacy crisis for liberal capitalism is in the offing in the West, and one cannot rule out such a crisis creating a greater acceptance of authoritarian attitudes. The last century was marked by fateful attempts to create alternative modernities – communism, fascism and national socialism – and we may have discounted these latter too soon.

To study the relationship between capitalism and democracy in this context is completely in line with Glasshouse Forum’s ambition to subject capitalism and its political consequences to critical scrutiny. Linked to the question of whether capitalism is possible without democracy is the question of whether capitalism will give rise to antidemocratic currents in this century too.

In 2007 the Israeli Professor of National Security Azar Gat published a noteworthy essay in Foreign Affairs with the title “The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers”. Glasshouse Forum contacted Gat, who agreed to contribute to a project on this theme. Its inception during the first half of 2008 has consisted of three special studies to complement Gat’s essay – see Drezner, Lagerkvist and Widmalm & Oskarsson (all of them can be downloaded below) – and a round-table discussion at the Maison Louis Carré outside Paris on 23-24 April 2008 .

An edited transcript of this discussion, revised and approved by those participating, can be downloaded below. The intention has been to bring clarity to these issues from different perspectives, and to gain some insight into the best way for Glasshouse Forum to take the analysis and the discussion further. A strategic analysis by the secretariat of how this work in progress should be pursued is available here.

Publications to date (September 2008)

An Edited Transcript from a Round-Table Conference on Authoritarian Capitalism, at Maison Louis Carré outside Paris 23-24 April 2008 (June 2008):

Download the full report