Events of the last five years have displayed the shift in the global centres of power.
Fifteen years ago, the USA was the unchallenged "superpower" (or as the French called it, "hyperpower") in the globe. By 1999, the USA had shown itself to be the world's supreme arbiter of justice, in the Kosovo war using the moral and military support of its NATO allies to bring an end to an attempted genocide and force about a change in government in Serbia (then still calling itself "Yugoslavia").
Today, the limits of America's power abroad are clear to be seen. The reign of George W. Bush displayed the amoral extent of US foreign policy to intervene and change governments in its own interests. The nadir of that was when, in 2003, post-war Iraq was ruled for a year by an American "viceroy", L.Paul Bremer III. In fact, for all his good intentions, Bremer was keen to emphasize his independence from Washington at the time; inadvertently declaring Iraq as his own personal domain. Such comments laid bare the ineptness and ignorance of American understanding of the world beyond its borders, and the lack of understanding of the places they were "intervening" in.
The Obama administration has gone to the other extreme, declaring a mostly "hands off" approach to foreign policy. The result has been an inconsistent application of that approach, in some ways similar to the foreign policy decisions made by Bill Clinton - intervening in some cases (such as Kosovo), in a half-hearted way in others (such as Bosnia and Somalia), and sometimes not at all (such as Rwanda). Clinton's approach could be explained as a steep learning curve, from the disaster in Somalia at the start of his tenure, to the success in Kosovo at the tail end of it.
But Obama's inconsistency has more been a victim to events and the political reality of the world around him. America is no longer able to act as the "supreme arbiter of justice" as it did at the end of Clinton administration, and much of the way through the Bush administration. Nowadays, America's power has been leeched off by other rising powers, such as China and a resurgent Russia. All its actions have to be tempered by what the reaction will be from its rivals. If the USA can intervene in Libya, then why can't Russia "intervene" in Ukraine? America's inconsistent and morally-ambiguous foreign policy is now coming back to bite it where it hurts.
In the popular TV series "Game Of Thrones", the land of Westeros is the setting for the "War Of Seven Kingdoms". In many ways, the globe can be effectively carved up into seven similar spheres of influence: The USA, China, Europe (the EU), Russia, The Arab World, Latin America, and India. Like in "Game Of Thrones", each of these centres of power is competing with the others for control, using both fair means and foul.
Going through them alphabetically, these "centres of power" can be summarised like this:
The Arab World
The "Arab World" stretches from the Straights of Gibraltar to the Persian Gulf. An excellent article and graphic by the "Economist" summarises its current status. Historically, the Arab World hasn't been united into anything approaching a coherent political entity for nearly five hundred years. The current collection of states owe their borders due to agreements and lines on a map drawn up by Europeans over the last hundred years, much of it as a result of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, their former masters. The result is something like a squabbling group of feudalistic satraps (some of whom claim to believe in "democracy") who control varying degrees of territory, resources and population. Collectively, they belong to a loose alliance that calls itself the "Arab League". Much of the wealth in this part of the world is focused at the eastern extremity, on the oil-rich lands around the Persian Gulf.
In the years since the Arab Spring, the relative stability that occurred between these many "players" has been disturbed, and in some parts, completely destroyed. Syria and now Iraq are in a state of civil war; Libya is teetering quite close to one; Yemen likewise. Within the Arab World, different (and surprising) alliances have been formed due to the rise of Islamic extremism; the one true beneficiary of the Arab Spring.
The USA and Europe look on, trying to make sense of the confusion and fluid allegiances, and make a mess of trying to choose the "right" sort of ally (Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Qatar?). Russia looks on with interest, plotting its own allegiances with duplicitous cunning; China, like a true merchant, always follows where the money is.
China
These days, China is at its pinnacle of development and potential in world history. China has been one of the world's pre-eminent powers for the last two thousand years, the chaos and relative decline of most of 19th and 20th centuries notwithstanding.
China today is ran as a highly-organised (and efficient) hierarchical capitalist state. While the powers of the USA and Europe disapprove of its human rights record and the fact that it is not a democracy, China's internal political system tends to reward efficiency and (on the whole) punishes bad organisation and corruption. While many critics call Russia a "modern feudal state", China's hierarchy rewards efficiency above anything else; in Russia, the system rewards loyalty to the centre above anything else. As a result of this, China's population understands how to get on; a simple work ethic is rewarded. It may not look pretty to Western eyes, but it works. China's government is popular with its people for the simple fact that living standards and a Chinese person's way of life has changed beyond imagining in the last twenty years; for example, China's thriving middle class is the same size as the entire population of Europe, or the USA or the Arab World. Words like "democracy" are meaningless in such a context. China has always been a strong state, and will continue to be so.
China's attitude to the abroad seems very straightforward: what it can get out of it. Like any great power, what China looks for above all is one thing: security. Having a natural merchant's mindset, China sees security in money, trade and resources. It is for this reason that it has gained larger economic control over some the resource-heavy parts of Africa, as well as a larger stake in the energy market in Central Asia and the Middle East.
Its "String Of Pearls" policy may look like an act of aggression to Western eyes, but this tells us more about Western insecurity about the USA and Europe's relative decline. Angry rhetoric about its claims over the South and East China Seas may also be a combination of nationalism at home and territorial security of its "near abroad". In this sense, it looks somewhat comparable with Russia, but minus the psychological insecurity.
Europe (The EU)
Like the Arab World, Europe is a collection of states; the difference is that most of them sit together as part of a super-national entity that has legal and economic authority over them, called the EU. Most of the EU shares the same currency, which is effectively controlled by Germany, the EU's biggest economic power. In many ways, the modern-day EU shares the same characteristics of the former European empire, Austria-Hungary: as a multi-national super-state with a parliament full of different languages, ruled by a unaccountable and essentially autocratic government that struggles to adapt to changing circumstances.
While the individual states of the EU are all recognised as democracies (though some far from perfect), the legal authority in Brussels that rules over them and dictates law to them, is not a democratic entity in the real sense of the word. Its "government" is appointed through opaque negotiation, while the "parliament" has little real control on the executive. In essence, the various nation-states that are part of the EU have given up many of their legal powers to a centralised European autocracy.
The contradiction here is that while the many nation-states of Europe have willingly surrendered power over their internal affairs to the EU, these nation-states still have almost complete independence in foreign affairs. While this works fine for the likes of Germany, it makes smaller countries look ridiculous on the world stage when they have to balance their commitments; rather like how the original Thirteen Colonies that made up the USA after their independence all had their own foreign affairs between gaining independence in 1783, and becoming a proper federal state, in 1789.
Of course, the EU does have its own foreign policy (and foreign minister, Catherine Ashton, since 2009), but when it has tried to create a combined front (such as over Ukraine), it has not taken long for the individual states' whims to take over, or be manipulated by outside "players". Just like with the Arab League.
India
In many ways, India is the polar opposite to China. While India is the "world power" with easily the second-biggest population, it is a democracy compared to China's one-party state. The other major difference is that while China is a highly-organised, centralised state, India is a highly corrupt, disorganised state. While in China, everyone knows who is in control, in India, it often appears that no-one is in control. The culture of corruption that infiltrates all levels of the government means that it is almost impossible to get things done. While China has leapt forward economically in the last twenty years, India's pace of growth has been far more modest; and that is down to a combination of corruption and inefficiency. While India's middle class has been growing in an impressive manner, without reforms in the basics of how the state is governed, this is simply a detail.
The talk of India becoming one of the "big players" on the world stage (as the USA would like to see) still looks like a far-off pipe-dream. There's being a democracy, and then there's "democracy" that paralyzes the decision-making process. This, combined with corruption and inefficiency, is what is keeping India on the lower rankings of the "players" on the world stage.
This compares to, say, Turkey: a nation with a population many times smaller than India, but has an efficiently-organised economy and a very well-structured government agenda that has allowed Turkey far greater influence with other (bigger) world powers than would have been thought possible.
India's "foreign policy", if it can be seriously called that, seems an incoherent tangle of ideas. Different politicians from the main parties have contradictory ideas about the future direction of the country; without a coherent sense of purpose, India will be going nowhere quickly, and will be prey to the designs of other, more powerful, rivals.
Latin America
Within Latin America (the American continent south of the Rio Grande), Brazil is by far the biggest power. Brazil's rise in the past ten years has been impressive, and has been helped with its growing energy market. Like India, Latin America is a "rising power", not a "risen power" like China, or to a much lesser extent, Russia. The main advantage that LatAm (primarily a result of Brazil's success, and to a lesser extent, Mexico's economic growth) has over India is that LatAm's foundations are firmer.
Brazil as the largest power in the region has recently started to tap into its potential: using its growing oil sector, and wealth, it has begun to build its economic independence on assertive foreign relations. The USA once considered LatAm to be its backyard, and historically claimed rights to the Western hemisphere. That changed with the more assertive Socialist government of "Lula" DaSilva a decade ago, and has continued with his successor, Dilma Rousseff.
This realignment of LatAm relations (essentially an assertion of independence) coincided with the first years of the Bush administration. A rising China was seen as a useful partner, LatAm welcomed China's hands-off approach, and a new economic alliance was born. By the end of the decade - and coinciding with the financial crisis - Brazil's oil independence meant that it had also become more assertive. This meant that Brazil became one of China's main rivals for influence and resources in sub-Saharan Africa.
With Europe consumed with its own economic problems, and the new Obama administration taking a more hands-off approach to some areas of foreign relations, much of Africa's resources were effectively up for grabs. Some African nations looked to Brazil as a more "European-like" partner to deal with, with the advantage of being geographically closer than Europe itself or China.
In other areas, LatAm's foreign policy has generally been to go against whatever the USA (or Europe) were doing. This explains the economic closeness to China, as well as healthy relations with Russia. In a primitive sense, some voices in the West would see LatAm as going from being on the side of the "good guys" to that of the "bad guys".
Russia
The author has spoken before about Russia's place in the world: its mentality is due to a combination of geography and history. It has been called a "modern-day feudal state" by some (although that term can be used about many places in the world). Historically, it has always been a "resource exporter": a hundred years ago and more, it was a grain exporter; now it is an oil and gas exporter. In many ways, the Kremlin is one of the archetypal "courts" of world power, as it has been for centuries. The fact that the current resident is not a "tsar" but there by popular will is a historical detail.
Russia has always been a country needed to be ruled by will-power. Its greatest time of weakness, in the late 16th and early 17th century (called the "Time Of Troubles"), was when the country was overrun by foreign powers, eventually leading to the rise of the Romanov family, who ruled the empire for the next three hundred years. The 1990s are seen by contemporary Russians in something of a similar light: a time of weakness and anarchy. Vladimir Putin changed all that.
Russia's foreign policy has always been to defend its interests in whatever way it can: if it means siding with butchers, so be it. Is the USA so very different, in spite of its claim to the highest motives? From Chechnya to Syria, Russia's interests are the Kremlin's interests, and vice versa.
Russia's historic antipathy towards the USA, and pragmatism elsewhere, have meant that Russia has made allies of China and Latin America, while following a policy of divide-and-rule in the Arab World and Europe. This has left the USA at perhaps its weakest moment in foreign relations in decades, perhaps since the start of the Second World War.
The USA
The USA's geo-political situation is well-known, as summarised at the start of the article. The USA's internal situation is akin to being divided between two factions (red and blue), managed by an kleptocratic elite - calling the USA a properly-functioning democracy is a bad joke. While productive and rich, the "empire" is going through a period of introspection, not seen since before the Second World War. Tired after fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for thirteen years, the American people now see that war abroad creates more problems than solutions. As I write, Iraq is effectively divided in three by sectarian and ethnic divisions, and Afghanistan looks like it may go the same way, de facto divided into a north and south along ethnic lines after a disputed presidential election. Karzai was the "strongman" that held the US-occupied country together; with him gone, the motivation to stay together becomes tenuous.
This would be the nightmare scenario for American foreign policy makers and military planners, with so much blood and treasure poured into a bottomless pit of chaos.
To be fair, I have omitted Japan, which is a huge oversight considering its economic might (if negligible military might). Somehow, Japan appears to carry less obvious geo-political influence over its neighbours than, say, Germany has over the rest of Europe. This has more to do with Japan's reliance on the USA as a military ally, lending itself to being a "pygmy" on the military round-table. Even in this globalised world of economics, military spending and prestige count for a lot. And while Germany's military spending is also modest, it has a lot more economic muscle it can leverage when it needs to; with huge China facing it across the sea, Japan's economic power can only be compared in respects to its neighbourhood. The behemoth of China dwarfs even the advanced economy of Japan.
These are the "players" in the game of global power. Right now, things bear a worrying similarity to things a hundred years ago, when Europe was divided into a variety of alliances.
More specifically, the Middle East looks like it has the most spontaneous likelihood to explode into a regional war. And no-one can predict where that could lead...
Showing posts with label China. Show all posts
Showing posts with label China. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
The Decline Of The West; or why Islam, China and "The East" are on the rise
I wrote a few months ago about the moral and ideological crisis that exists in the West, using the UK as an example.
It always pays to be a student of history, because then you begin to realise that many aspects of historical change get repeated. In the article mentioned above, I explained how extremist Muslims (and ideological extremists in general, for that matter) have been able to take advantage of the ideological confusion prevalent in the West in general (and the UK in particular, as an example).
I am not a right-wing conservative; if anything, I am a left-wing liberal. Nick Cohen's "You Can't Read This Book" that I mentioned in my earlier article may be about censorship, but the point he makes is a basic one. When a society no longer knows how to defend its own principles, it has lost its moral purpose, and can quickly become victim to outsiders with stronger (and more uncompromising) standpoints. Islamic extremism is an example of that, and how extremists have used "free speech" as an excuse to spread intolerance against criticism, and impose behaviours and practices on those of their own faith (or even non-believers), even if it breaks the law, and excuse it as "culture".
It pays to read history. While for some we may be living through a time of unprecedented freedoms, this is a dangerous illusion. The 1930s were synonymous with the "appeasement" of Fascism; in many ways, this is also what much of the West is guilty of in regards to the authoritarian regimes of the East now; the intellectual inability to tackle Muslim extremism is potentially as serious a problem. Compared with this, Fascism in Europe and Japanese expansionism was just a flash-in-the-pan moment. The stakes now may well be much higher in the longer term than those posed by Fascism and the Japanese Empire in the 1930s: China is the biggest (and soon to be richest) country in the world; meanwhile Islam is the fastest-growing (and intolerant) religion in the world. Regarding either of these issues, there seems to be no clear answer from the West. I'll talk more about why this is later.
This might sound like a preamble to "The Clash Of Civilisations", and I will accept that. I read the book without knowing firsthand that the author was a right-wing conservative. It makes for an engaging and well-argued piece of work. I may not agree with the author's politics, but the points he raises are worth serious consideration, especially that we are now twenty years after it was written.
It feels like we are at a pivotal moment in history. For the first time in centuries, the future of the West looks increasingly uncertain, while that of the East looks increasingly rosy.
Where exactly does true "freedom" exist? By "freedom", I mean the freedom to express your own opinion without fear of reprisal, let alone "democracy"; or the freedom to wear what you wish and behave as you like, provided it is not violent or aggressive?
In 2013, the number of places in the world is terrifyingly small in reality. In a general sense, this would probably include (and even this is debatable) the "Anglosphere" (i.e. the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand), most of geographical Europe, Japan, and a small number of other former European colonies. Beyond that, we are getting into increasingly shady areas of grey.
On the optimistic side, the USA's future looks secure in the long term, if it can avoid tearing itself in two in "culture wars" over polarising issues such as gun control and social values. The USA's demographic make-up is due to change to being majority non-white in the coming decades, but this is unlikely to have a significant change on the stability of the country's future: as American values such as freedom of expression and (imperfect) democracy are sacrosanct and enshrined in its belief system, there is no threat to this being ideologically challenged.
That said, George W. Bush's "War On Terror" had an inadvertent effect on "The East": it gave authoritarian regimes a ready excuse to ignore the West's criticisms and be even more authoritarian. It fatally weakened the moral standpoint of the West to foreign eyes, as they traded some of their freedoms for a greater sense of security; this also boosted the moral standpoint of Muslim extremism as they attacked the "hypocrisy" of the West. From that point on, there was no way back.
While on one side the "War On Terror" fatally damaged the moral standpoint of the West in "Eastern" (and Muslim) eyes, it was also the West's perceived ideological weakness at home that has damaged it even further.
This has been especially true in the UK and Europe in general, which has seemed incapable of forming a strategy to ideologically defeat Islamic extremism. As I mentioned earlier, when a nation no longer knows what it really stands for, it can quickly become a victim to more virulent, outside ideologies. This partially explains why Islamic extremism has been allowed to flourish almost unchecked in the UK and some parts of Europe.
The problem is also that while Muslim moderates outnumber the extremists, they are silent when criticised by their extremist co-religionists.
The Muslim moderates seem incapable of defending their moderation intellectually; either by an intellectual vacuum, or lacking the moral certainty that extremism brings. Either in the West or in Muslim countries themselves, moderate Muslims seemed to be easily shouted-down and persecuted by their fundamentalist peers.
Muslim extremism is therefore bound to expand as a greater and greater aspect of Islam generally because it is not clouded by doubt; all their decisions are chosen by God; not their nationality or anything else. Westerners are not prepared to sacrifice their lives for their ideas; Muslim extremists are. This is what makes Islam so dangerous to the West's ideological future; if neither the West nor Muslim moderates can beat the extremists, extremism will only grow. There is no such thing as having a debate with an extremist; the idea of "debate" is anathema to them.
The simple explanation for this is that both Islamic extremism, and the ideology of authoritarianism prevalent in the "East", do not have to tackle the issue of "freedom of thought" that exists in the West.
In the West, ideas are discussed and the answer is arrived at (at least in theory) through intellectual debate. Only by allowing freedom of thought and expression can all ideas (and therefore, the best one) be discovered.
The conventional wisdom in the West is that the most advanced and richest countries in the world would logically be those that are the freest. This may well be a simplistic vision, but one that any Westerner would recognise.
Francis Fukuyama's book "The End Of History" bought into this idea, predicting twenty years ago since the West had won the "war of ideas" with the Soviet Union, the rest of the world would follow suit, and join "the land of milk and honey"; where freedom and democracy reign.
Twenty years on from that, it is easy to mock such optimism.
The more nuanced reality is that, in many ways, the "East" did learn lessons from the West and the end of the Cold War. China, for one, learned how it was possible to have its cake and eat it: it implemented "Communism with Chinese characteristics" long before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and thus over a thirty-year period became the world's most successful (and efficient) one-party Capitalist state. Russia, after the chaotic decade following the end of Communism, rediscovered the joys of authoritarianism under Putin, and follows a similar model to China, albeit with a few "democratic indulgences", such as technically having a multi-party parliamentary system.
The irony now is that the most politically-stable countries and those with the brightest economic prospects are almost all in the East. China and Russia's futures are secure; the same can be said of the Gulf States; Turkey's future, also looks rosy, in spite of now having an increasingly authoritarian (and Islamic) government. But Erdogan is simply doing what other "Eastern" leaders have done. The same can be said of the Gulf States; their culture may seem a bizarre hybrid of Capitalism and Islam, but it works for them. They have all learned to take from the West what they can apply easily to their own countries, and discard the rest, excusing it on "culture". This is how the East has been able to be more efficient Capitalists than Westerners; as they see "human rights" (and employee rights) as a Western indulgence, and only pay lip service to such ideas when they need to.
In the East, people are willing to ignore the concept of "freedom" as long as the economy is doing well. In the West, people see the two as inextricably linked. This is the key difference.
Easterners may well therefore look at the current economic and ideological malaise in the West as being a direct result of their "freedom". What a Westerner considers freedom, an Easterner could instead call "weakness", or "moral degradation". The USA is currently struggling economically; the UK is moribund; the Eurozone has become a German economic protectorate. So while the East is prospering because it has found a formula that marries Eastern authoritarianism with Western elements of Capitalism, the West is failing (and getting poorer) because of weaknesses in the structure of its ideology.
To take the example of China (though there are many others, such as Russia or the Gulf States), its one-party command model of the country allows it to make decisions at a moment's notice. If it wants to build a dam, or a new city, it simply gets the ball rolling. If this plan fails (and causes massive unemployment, or other social and environmental problems), it just brushes itself off, learns some lessons, and tries another approach. While this is a simplification, for the most part, this is how the East gets things done. It is learning-by-doing, or a trial-and-error approach to government. The Soviet Union was another classic example of this methodology. The large exception to this rule, India, is a democracy: and because this system encourages debate at the expense of decision-making, it it means that large, strategic and long-term decisions are faced with interminable delays.
This is the problem that the West now faces, too. The trial-and-error approach that the East does as second nature faces huge hurdles in the West. The "freedom" that democracy brings to the West (that the East sees as inherently anarchic) means that governmental decisions (especially long-term ones) generally have to be arrived at carefully and only after long deliberation and debate. But the free nature of the West, and the "problem" of democracy means that no government can be at all sure that any long-term decision one government makes will be continued by the next. Institutional short-termism is therefore the natural result of freedom and democracy in the West. Even if governments do decide to stick with a plan, the right to free expression means that a government can quickly cave-in to popular resentment, because they want to be re-elected at the next election. This is the nature of democracy.
This also explains why, counter-intuitively, the East is better equipped at reacting to a crisis than the West. This explains why the American President may be on paper the most man person in the world, but is ineffectual at making any changes to his own country; and also explains why the Chinese Premier can flex far more muscle and effect change rapidly in his own country and the world, when he wants to. It explains why China can build Maglevs, and why the UK's own train network is a shambles.
I propose no answer to this situation. As I see it, there may well be none. The East and The West simply have different ideological ideas, and thus cannot be reconciled. The West is now institutionally and ideologically weak compared to the East. And yet, if the West is not consistent in its ideological support of freedom and democracy, then it stands for nothing. It seems pointless trying to preach to The East about our values; the evidence has shown that all that happens is that the other "culture" takes what it can to make itself stronger; it distrusts anything that will make it weaker.This is normal, and to be expected of any culture that has a sense of self-respect.
It is the West that has failed; it is the East that has won.
It always pays to be a student of history, because then you begin to realise that many aspects of historical change get repeated. In the article mentioned above, I explained how extremist Muslims (and ideological extremists in general, for that matter) have been able to take advantage of the ideological confusion prevalent in the West in general (and the UK in particular, as an example).
I am not a right-wing conservative; if anything, I am a left-wing liberal. Nick Cohen's "You Can't Read This Book" that I mentioned in my earlier article may be about censorship, but the point he makes is a basic one. When a society no longer knows how to defend its own principles, it has lost its moral purpose, and can quickly become victim to outsiders with stronger (and more uncompromising) standpoints. Islamic extremism is an example of that, and how extremists have used "free speech" as an excuse to spread intolerance against criticism, and impose behaviours and practices on those of their own faith (or even non-believers), even if it breaks the law, and excuse it as "culture".
It pays to read history. While for some we may be living through a time of unprecedented freedoms, this is a dangerous illusion. The 1930s were synonymous with the "appeasement" of Fascism; in many ways, this is also what much of the West is guilty of in regards to the authoritarian regimes of the East now; the intellectual inability to tackle Muslim extremism is potentially as serious a problem. Compared with this, Fascism in Europe and Japanese expansionism was just a flash-in-the-pan moment. The stakes now may well be much higher in the longer term than those posed by Fascism and the Japanese Empire in the 1930s: China is the biggest (and soon to be richest) country in the world; meanwhile Islam is the fastest-growing (and intolerant) religion in the world. Regarding either of these issues, there seems to be no clear answer from the West. I'll talk more about why this is later.
This might sound like a preamble to "The Clash Of Civilisations", and I will accept that. I read the book without knowing firsthand that the author was a right-wing conservative. It makes for an engaging and well-argued piece of work. I may not agree with the author's politics, but the points he raises are worth serious consideration, especially that we are now twenty years after it was written.
It feels like we are at a pivotal moment in history. For the first time in centuries, the future of the West looks increasingly uncertain, while that of the East looks increasingly rosy.
Where exactly does true "freedom" exist? By "freedom", I mean the freedom to express your own opinion without fear of reprisal, let alone "democracy"; or the freedom to wear what you wish and behave as you like, provided it is not violent or aggressive?
In 2013, the number of places in the world is terrifyingly small in reality. In a general sense, this would probably include (and even this is debatable) the "Anglosphere" (i.e. the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand), most of geographical Europe, Japan, and a small number of other former European colonies. Beyond that, we are getting into increasingly shady areas of grey.
On the optimistic side, the USA's future looks secure in the long term, if it can avoid tearing itself in two in "culture wars" over polarising issues such as gun control and social values. The USA's demographic make-up is due to change to being majority non-white in the coming decades, but this is unlikely to have a significant change on the stability of the country's future: as American values such as freedom of expression and (imperfect) democracy are sacrosanct and enshrined in its belief system, there is no threat to this being ideologically challenged.
That said, George W. Bush's "War On Terror" had an inadvertent effect on "The East": it gave authoritarian regimes a ready excuse to ignore the West's criticisms and be even more authoritarian. It fatally weakened the moral standpoint of the West to foreign eyes, as they traded some of their freedoms for a greater sense of security; this also boosted the moral standpoint of Muslim extremism as they attacked the "hypocrisy" of the West. From that point on, there was no way back.
While on one side the "War On Terror" fatally damaged the moral standpoint of the West in "Eastern" (and Muslim) eyes, it was also the West's perceived ideological weakness at home that has damaged it even further.
This has been especially true in the UK and Europe in general, which has seemed incapable of forming a strategy to ideologically defeat Islamic extremism. As I mentioned earlier, when a nation no longer knows what it really stands for, it can quickly become a victim to more virulent, outside ideologies. This partially explains why Islamic extremism has been allowed to flourish almost unchecked in the UK and some parts of Europe.
The problem is also that while Muslim moderates outnumber the extremists, they are silent when criticised by their extremist co-religionists.
The Muslim moderates seem incapable of defending their moderation intellectually; either by an intellectual vacuum, or lacking the moral certainty that extremism brings. Either in the West or in Muslim countries themselves, moderate Muslims seemed to be easily shouted-down and persecuted by their fundamentalist peers.
Muslim extremism is therefore bound to expand as a greater and greater aspect of Islam generally because it is not clouded by doubt; all their decisions are chosen by God; not their nationality or anything else. Westerners are not prepared to sacrifice their lives for their ideas; Muslim extremists are. This is what makes Islam so dangerous to the West's ideological future; if neither the West nor Muslim moderates can beat the extremists, extremism will only grow. There is no such thing as having a debate with an extremist; the idea of "debate" is anathema to them.
The simple explanation for this is that both Islamic extremism, and the ideology of authoritarianism prevalent in the "East", do not have to tackle the issue of "freedom of thought" that exists in the West.
In the West, ideas are discussed and the answer is arrived at (at least in theory) through intellectual debate. Only by allowing freedom of thought and expression can all ideas (and therefore, the best one) be discovered.
The conventional wisdom in the West is that the most advanced and richest countries in the world would logically be those that are the freest. This may well be a simplistic vision, but one that any Westerner would recognise.
Francis Fukuyama's book "The End Of History" bought into this idea, predicting twenty years ago since the West had won the "war of ideas" with the Soviet Union, the rest of the world would follow suit, and join "the land of milk and honey"; where freedom and democracy reign.
Twenty years on from that, it is easy to mock such optimism.
The more nuanced reality is that, in many ways, the "East" did learn lessons from the West and the end of the Cold War. China, for one, learned how it was possible to have its cake and eat it: it implemented "Communism with Chinese characteristics" long before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and thus over a thirty-year period became the world's most successful (and efficient) one-party Capitalist state. Russia, after the chaotic decade following the end of Communism, rediscovered the joys of authoritarianism under Putin, and follows a similar model to China, albeit with a few "democratic indulgences", such as technically having a multi-party parliamentary system.
The irony now is that the most politically-stable countries and those with the brightest economic prospects are almost all in the East. China and Russia's futures are secure; the same can be said of the Gulf States; Turkey's future, also looks rosy, in spite of now having an increasingly authoritarian (and Islamic) government. But Erdogan is simply doing what other "Eastern" leaders have done. The same can be said of the Gulf States; their culture may seem a bizarre hybrid of Capitalism and Islam, but it works for them. They have all learned to take from the West what they can apply easily to their own countries, and discard the rest, excusing it on "culture". This is how the East has been able to be more efficient Capitalists than Westerners; as they see "human rights" (and employee rights) as a Western indulgence, and only pay lip service to such ideas when they need to.
In the East, people are willing to ignore the concept of "freedom" as long as the economy is doing well. In the West, people see the two as inextricably linked. This is the key difference.
Easterners may well therefore look at the current economic and ideological malaise in the West as being a direct result of their "freedom". What a Westerner considers freedom, an Easterner could instead call "weakness", or "moral degradation". The USA is currently struggling economically; the UK is moribund; the Eurozone has become a German economic protectorate. So while the East is prospering because it has found a formula that marries Eastern authoritarianism with Western elements of Capitalism, the West is failing (and getting poorer) because of weaknesses in the structure of its ideology.
To take the example of China (though there are many others, such as Russia or the Gulf States), its one-party command model of the country allows it to make decisions at a moment's notice. If it wants to build a dam, or a new city, it simply gets the ball rolling. If this plan fails (and causes massive unemployment, or other social and environmental problems), it just brushes itself off, learns some lessons, and tries another approach. While this is a simplification, for the most part, this is how the East gets things done. It is learning-by-doing, or a trial-and-error approach to government. The Soviet Union was another classic example of this methodology. The large exception to this rule, India, is a democracy: and because this system encourages debate at the expense of decision-making, it it means that large, strategic and long-term decisions are faced with interminable delays.
This is the problem that the West now faces, too. The trial-and-error approach that the East does as second nature faces huge hurdles in the West. The "freedom" that democracy brings to the West (that the East sees as inherently anarchic) means that governmental decisions (especially long-term ones) generally have to be arrived at carefully and only after long deliberation and debate. But the free nature of the West, and the "problem" of democracy means that no government can be at all sure that any long-term decision one government makes will be continued by the next. Institutional short-termism is therefore the natural result of freedom and democracy in the West. Even if governments do decide to stick with a plan, the right to free expression means that a government can quickly cave-in to popular resentment, because they want to be re-elected at the next election. This is the nature of democracy.
This also explains why, counter-intuitively, the East is better equipped at reacting to a crisis than the West. This explains why the American President may be on paper the most man person in the world, but is ineffectual at making any changes to his own country; and also explains why the Chinese Premier can flex far more muscle and effect change rapidly in his own country and the world, when he wants to. It explains why China can build Maglevs, and why the UK's own train network is a shambles.
I propose no answer to this situation. As I see it, there may well be none. The East and The West simply have different ideological ideas, and thus cannot be reconciled. The West is now institutionally and ideologically weak compared to the East. And yet, if the West is not consistent in its ideological support of freedom and democracy, then it stands for nothing. It seems pointless trying to preach to The East about our values; the evidence has shown that all that happens is that the other "culture" takes what it can to make itself stronger; it distrusts anything that will make it weaker.This is normal, and to be expected of any culture that has a sense of self-respect.
It is the West that has failed; it is the East that has won.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
China's domination is inevitable, but no reason to worry.
When pundits predicted China's rise to dominance twenty or thirty years ago, many were dismissive. No longer. But many of those recent converts to the new orthodoxy have gone to the other extreme; from once dismissing China, they've gone into hysterical paranoia about China putting the rest of the world in a virtual stranglehold.
This is misplaced, and ignorant. Certainly China is the pre-eminent economic and trading power in the world, but its military power still lags far behind that of the USA. The real question is to understand what the Chinese themselves want out of the world.
Western thinkers who spread threats of World War Three between China and the USA base this thinking on their own logic: Western powers spread their might over the the rest of the globe through war, colonisation and settling to other parts of the world over several centuries. They assume that China wants the same thing: dominance through control of territory. But China's methods and aims are more subtle. You only have to compare European and Chinese history to get an understanding of that.
A overview of how the West and China came to evolve over two thousand years to their current state of human evolution (eg. through advances in science and technology) is informative.
For a period of more than one thousand years (roughly between 300BC to 1300AD) China was consistently ahead of Europe in most areas of technology and scientific research.
Europeans think that logic and philosophy are Greek inventions, but the Chinese had similar philosophical schools around the same time period, possibly even slightly earlier, known as the "School of Names". Inventions such as the abacus, the recording of comets, the first building of the Great Wall of China, and the crossbow, were all invented long before the birth of Christ. The ancient Greeks had also invented the crossbow, but this weapon quickly went out of use, and was not widely used again for more than one thousand years in Europe. The Chinese, however, continued to improve upon it. Also in the area of weaponry, the ancient Chinese invented a sort of early halberd (a spear that combines an axe with a dagger-head), that was not widely used in Europe till the Middle Ages.
These are just a few examples. There are then the so-called "Four Great Inventions" in early China, while Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome. These were the compass, paper, printing, and gunpowder. Although some of these inventions still needed time to improve, these were things completely unknown to Europe at the time. Gunpowder was used in China nearly a thousand years before Europe; the same for printing. From that, China built there own early version of the musket, centuries before Europeans, as well as cannons. The Chinese also created other military innovations such as Chinese lanterns for signalling and spying. There are then quasi-industrial inventions such as pistons, cast iron, propeller, sluice gates for canals, all a thousand years before their common use in Europe.
I could go on, but I don't want to labour the point, which is that by the time Europe had its Renaissance, China had had at least a five-hundred-year head start on technological innovation, and even China contemporaneous with the Roman Empire was probably still comfortably ahead technologically. The fall of Rome and the Dark Ages put Europe in a funk, and it was only by the Renaissance that they had somewhat caught up with the Chinese, though still a bit behind.
There is a phrase in Capitalism called "Creative Destruction" that goes some way to explaining why the Renaissance happened in Europe at all. The idea is that you have to cause a little anarchy, shaking up the system, in order to promote new ideas. By the time that the Renaissance started in Europe (in the 13th century), China had had more than a thousand years of "creative destruction": China had been at various times over the previous thousand years divided into competing states, or gone from one dynasty quickly being uprooted by the next. There is some credence in the thinking that, like with Europe's creative mess that provoked the Renaissance, this all kept the creative juices flowing in China, as competing powers were always trying to out-do the other in technological pursuits in order to gain an upper hand.
The other thing that was in Europe's favour in causing the Renaissance, was its geography. With the irregular landscape, mountain ranges and so on, it was nigh impossible for "stability" to be created in Europe. There would always be small states, like in Italy, where this continual to-and-fro would provoke ideas to gain the upper hand on political rivals.
China's geography was different, being essentially a large, relatively uniform landscape (about the same size of Europe, with a similar-sized population), dissected by two large rivers. This meant it was in theory easier for one dynasty to control for a longer period of time, given the right circumstances. I'll return to this point shortly.
The coming of the Renaissance in Europe in the 13th century coincided with the arrival of the Mongols onto the world scene. This would prove pivotal for world and Chinese history. The Mongols overran China, ruling from 1271 till 1368, and at the same time, over-running much of the rest of Asia and the Middle East, as far as Eastern Europe.
This would be pivotal for two reasons. First, the sheer scale of the Mongol Empire meant that, for the first time, Chinese trade and ideas could be much more easily transported to the West. The second reason relates to what happened when the Mongol rule of China was defeated in 1368, and a misconception that the West holds about the Mongols.
Mongol rule in China did not bring about a collapse of Chinese innovation; by contrast, it flourished, with further technological and scientific discoveries being made and put into good use. But when the new Chinese Emperor saw the array of technological contraptions in the former Mongol Emperor's palace, he dismissed it all as indicative of the indulgence of their foreign masters, and decreed them all destroyed, discouraging further research into such unnecessary pursuits. Although extensive trade with the Middle East and Africa continued unabated for a while, Chinese research and development never really held its previous high value, and in a matter of a few hundred years, the Chinese were relying on Western explorers' expertise for improving on their now-anachronistic technology.
And yet, paradoxically, the decline in Chinese innovation, happening at around the same time that Europeans' innovations were proliferating, did not adversely affect the lot of the average Chinese peasant compared to his European contemporary. In the four centuries after the restoration of Chinese sovereignty from the Mongols, the average life expectancy in China was roughly between five to ten years high than the Europeans'. The reason was this: China was never, except during occasional periods of political instability, poor in a real sense. The Chinese court was rich from European trade; China's previous extensive exploration and trade links as far as East Africa declined as the Chinese Empire's priorities changed. China, in other words, became complacent and generally content with its lot. It was rich; the West indulged it for China's richness of resources; it was not in imminent danger of invasion. The conditions suitable for "Creative Destruction" that had spurred its previous thousand years of innovation had dried up. As a result, during the 16th century it suffered from a weak, corrupt and long-lived rulers. The dynasty was eventually overthrown in the middle of the 17th century, but the same state of complacency was difficult to get rid of.
By the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, China, while economically stable and self-sufficient, its technology was centuries out-of-date compared to Europe due to lack of innovative curiosity. With the onset of Imperialism, the 19th century brought Europeans to China's territorial doorstep. From that point onwards, the decline and political collapse was just a matter of time. The first half of 20th century was arguably the most chaotic period in Chinese history for a thousand years, with civil war overlapping with Japanese invasion. Communism brought stability in 1949, but it was another thirty years before its leader, Deng Xiaoping, had the courage to make the reforms necessary to activate China's long-dormant, massive potential.
So that brings us up-to-date, and provides the necessary context to better understand China's position and where she sees herself in the world. In a nutshell, China seems to see herself primarily as a nation of producers and merchants. It is well-known that China is making significant inroads into Africa and South America, but mainly Africa; particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at the historical context, this seems to be simply putting its global reach of a thousand years ago into reset mode. It plans to create a so-called "String Of Pearls": a number of naval and commercial outposts that dot the Indian Ocean, from Burma and Bangladesh, west to Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and down the East African coast.
What will a world with a pre-eminent China look like? From what I can tell, China priorities are, in the following order, about: ensuring a stable supply of resources (from Africa etc.) to maintain the continued improvements in its population's quality of life; ensuring a stable trade with the West for the same purpose; and to maintain a suitably-sized military to protect those interests. Those priorities are nothing controversial or outlandish.
To be sure, there are other factors that the West has to pencil in: China is sensitive about having its values misunderstood and has no moral objections to using clandestine methods to make its points. Issues like human rights can provoke responses like the disabling of communications systems through hacking and sophisticated viruses. But this is no more than to expect from any wily merchant-civilisation carefully protecting its position. China does not want war: it is bad for business.
As we have seen from Chinese history, as a people and civilisation they are nothing if not endlessly-inventive and resourceful. The description I used as a "nation of merchants" puts me in mind of the Venetian Republic: a commercial power, industrious and innovative, that grew to be a world leader for a time.
The USA shares a similar outlook and mentality, albeit with a more assertive military and an over-confidence in its philosophical superiority over its rivals. These are long-term disadvantages to the American position in the world. China has a few important advantages over the USA in the long-term: China has a huge population; it has better productivity; its military budget is modest compared to its size; it is diplomatically-astute; in the West, it has a stable and reliable demand base, and its native population is expanding its purchasing power.
The future is China's, but don't panic; they've got everything under control.
This is misplaced, and ignorant. Certainly China is the pre-eminent economic and trading power in the world, but its military power still lags far behind that of the USA. The real question is to understand what the Chinese themselves want out of the world.
Western thinkers who spread threats of World War Three between China and the USA base this thinking on their own logic: Western powers spread their might over the the rest of the globe through war, colonisation and settling to other parts of the world over several centuries. They assume that China wants the same thing: dominance through control of territory. But China's methods and aims are more subtle. You only have to compare European and Chinese history to get an understanding of that.
A overview of how the West and China came to evolve over two thousand years to their current state of human evolution (eg. through advances in science and technology) is informative.
For a period of more than one thousand years (roughly between 300BC to 1300AD) China was consistently ahead of Europe in most areas of technology and scientific research.
Europeans think that logic and philosophy are Greek inventions, but the Chinese had similar philosophical schools around the same time period, possibly even slightly earlier, known as the "School of Names". Inventions such as the abacus, the recording of comets, the first building of the Great Wall of China, and the crossbow, were all invented long before the birth of Christ. The ancient Greeks had also invented the crossbow, but this weapon quickly went out of use, and was not widely used again for more than one thousand years in Europe. The Chinese, however, continued to improve upon it. Also in the area of weaponry, the ancient Chinese invented a sort of early halberd (a spear that combines an axe with a dagger-head), that was not widely used in Europe till the Middle Ages.
These are just a few examples. There are then the so-called "Four Great Inventions" in early China, while Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome. These were the compass, paper, printing, and gunpowder. Although some of these inventions still needed time to improve, these were things completely unknown to Europe at the time. Gunpowder was used in China nearly a thousand years before Europe; the same for printing. From that, China built there own early version of the musket, centuries before Europeans, as well as cannons. The Chinese also created other military innovations such as Chinese lanterns for signalling and spying. There are then quasi-industrial inventions such as pistons, cast iron, propeller, sluice gates for canals, all a thousand years before their common use in Europe.
I could go on, but I don't want to labour the point, which is that by the time Europe had its Renaissance, China had had at least a five-hundred-year head start on technological innovation, and even China contemporaneous with the Roman Empire was probably still comfortably ahead technologically. The fall of Rome and the Dark Ages put Europe in a funk, and it was only by the Renaissance that they had somewhat caught up with the Chinese, though still a bit behind.
There is a phrase in Capitalism called "Creative Destruction" that goes some way to explaining why the Renaissance happened in Europe at all. The idea is that you have to cause a little anarchy, shaking up the system, in order to promote new ideas. By the time that the Renaissance started in Europe (in the 13th century), China had had more than a thousand years of "creative destruction": China had been at various times over the previous thousand years divided into competing states, or gone from one dynasty quickly being uprooted by the next. There is some credence in the thinking that, like with Europe's creative mess that provoked the Renaissance, this all kept the creative juices flowing in China, as competing powers were always trying to out-do the other in technological pursuits in order to gain an upper hand.
The other thing that was in Europe's favour in causing the Renaissance, was its geography. With the irregular landscape, mountain ranges and so on, it was nigh impossible for "stability" to be created in Europe. There would always be small states, like in Italy, where this continual to-and-fro would provoke ideas to gain the upper hand on political rivals.
China's geography was different, being essentially a large, relatively uniform landscape (about the same size of Europe, with a similar-sized population), dissected by two large rivers. This meant it was in theory easier for one dynasty to control for a longer period of time, given the right circumstances. I'll return to this point shortly.
The coming of the Renaissance in Europe in the 13th century coincided with the arrival of the Mongols onto the world scene. This would prove pivotal for world and Chinese history. The Mongols overran China, ruling from 1271 till 1368, and at the same time, over-running much of the rest of Asia and the Middle East, as far as Eastern Europe.
This would be pivotal for two reasons. First, the sheer scale of the Mongol Empire meant that, for the first time, Chinese trade and ideas could be much more easily transported to the West. The second reason relates to what happened when the Mongol rule of China was defeated in 1368, and a misconception that the West holds about the Mongols.
Mongol rule in China did not bring about a collapse of Chinese innovation; by contrast, it flourished, with further technological and scientific discoveries being made and put into good use. But when the new Chinese Emperor saw the array of technological contraptions in the former Mongol Emperor's palace, he dismissed it all as indicative of the indulgence of their foreign masters, and decreed them all destroyed, discouraging further research into such unnecessary pursuits. Although extensive trade with the Middle East and Africa continued unabated for a while, Chinese research and development never really held its previous high value, and in a matter of a few hundred years, the Chinese were relying on Western explorers' expertise for improving on their now-anachronistic technology.
And yet, paradoxically, the decline in Chinese innovation, happening at around the same time that Europeans' innovations were proliferating, did not adversely affect the lot of the average Chinese peasant compared to his European contemporary. In the four centuries after the restoration of Chinese sovereignty from the Mongols, the average life expectancy in China was roughly between five to ten years high than the Europeans'. The reason was this: China was never, except during occasional periods of political instability, poor in a real sense. The Chinese court was rich from European trade; China's previous extensive exploration and trade links as far as East Africa declined as the Chinese Empire's priorities changed. China, in other words, became complacent and generally content with its lot. It was rich; the West indulged it for China's richness of resources; it was not in imminent danger of invasion. The conditions suitable for "Creative Destruction" that had spurred its previous thousand years of innovation had dried up. As a result, during the 16th century it suffered from a weak, corrupt and long-lived rulers. The dynasty was eventually overthrown in the middle of the 17th century, but the same state of complacency was difficult to get rid of.
By the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, China, while economically stable and self-sufficient, its technology was centuries out-of-date compared to Europe due to lack of innovative curiosity. With the onset of Imperialism, the 19th century brought Europeans to China's territorial doorstep. From that point onwards, the decline and political collapse was just a matter of time. The first half of 20th century was arguably the most chaotic period in Chinese history for a thousand years, with civil war overlapping with Japanese invasion. Communism brought stability in 1949, but it was another thirty years before its leader, Deng Xiaoping, had the courage to make the reforms necessary to activate China's long-dormant, massive potential.
So that brings us up-to-date, and provides the necessary context to better understand China's position and where she sees herself in the world. In a nutshell, China seems to see herself primarily as a nation of producers and merchants. It is well-known that China is making significant inroads into Africa and South America, but mainly Africa; particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at the historical context, this seems to be simply putting its global reach of a thousand years ago into reset mode. It plans to create a so-called "String Of Pearls": a number of naval and commercial outposts that dot the Indian Ocean, from Burma and Bangladesh, west to Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and down the East African coast.
What will a world with a pre-eminent China look like? From what I can tell, China priorities are, in the following order, about: ensuring a stable supply of resources (from Africa etc.) to maintain the continued improvements in its population's quality of life; ensuring a stable trade with the West for the same purpose; and to maintain a suitably-sized military to protect those interests. Those priorities are nothing controversial or outlandish.
To be sure, there are other factors that the West has to pencil in: China is sensitive about having its values misunderstood and has no moral objections to using clandestine methods to make its points. Issues like human rights can provoke responses like the disabling of communications systems through hacking and sophisticated viruses. But this is no more than to expect from any wily merchant-civilisation carefully protecting its position. China does not want war: it is bad for business.
As we have seen from Chinese history, as a people and civilisation they are nothing if not endlessly-inventive and resourceful. The description I used as a "nation of merchants" puts me in mind of the Venetian Republic: a commercial power, industrious and innovative, that grew to be a world leader for a time.
The USA shares a similar outlook and mentality, albeit with a more assertive military and an over-confidence in its philosophical superiority over its rivals. These are long-term disadvantages to the American position in the world. China has a few important advantages over the USA in the long-term: China has a huge population; it has better productivity; its military budget is modest compared to its size; it is diplomatically-astute; in the West, it has a stable and reliable demand base, and its native population is expanding its purchasing power.
The future is China's, but don't panic; they've got everything under control.
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