China: Xi Jinping is “a president who has ruthlessly centralised power while embarking on an ambitious project to revitalise Communist rule and to secure the party’s future. … One of his major themes is a war on ‘western values’, including a free press, democracy and the constitutional separation of powers, all of which he believes pose an insidious threat to one-party rule. … Xi considers himself the antithesis of the ‘weak man’ who turned out the light on the Soviet empire.”

India:  A “cult of personality is slowly building around” Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “No surprise, then, that he rules firmly. … Many fear that unchallenged by a weakened opposition, Mr Modi will help turn the world’s largest – and most diverse – democracy into a Hindu nationalist state. There’s trepidation over a lack of tolerance among many of Mr Modi’s supporters, particularly on social media, to any criticism.”

Russia: “The elevation of Mr Putin as a father of the nation, a man who may be elected in a nominal political process but is in fact apart from and above politics, is a symptom of Russia’s ‘deep demodernising trend’, according to Andrei Zorin, a historian at Oxford University.”

Turkey: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip “Erdogan’s achievements are now shadowed by his undeniable lurch toward autocracy. Over the last year, he has initiated a harsh crackdown against peaceful protesters, political opponents, and independent media outlets.”

This is a radically incomplete list, but it includes the leaders of countries with nearly 3 billion subjects and great international influence. How profoundly disappointing that the ascendant ideology of the 1930s should again confront us.

Of course, the momentum in the direction of macho, nationalist, centralizing authoritarianism is not unstoppable. This trend is of fairly short duration–so far–and could still be checked. The question is whether we can develop a sufficiently cohesive, energetic, optimistic, and truly global democratic movement to resist it.

See also: postcolonial reaction;  why is oligarchy everywhere? and why is oligarchy everywhere? (part 2).

The post the age of the strongman appeared first on Peter Levine.

The situation involving Greece and the European Union is a complex game, with numerous players and potentially many phases. Just as an example, voters in Spain are players who will have a chance to choose the new government in December; they may opt to support Podemos, the relatively left-wing Spanish party, if they think that the Greeks did well by choosing Syriza last week.

Nevertheless, we can dramatically simplify the game to have two key players: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Tsipras can accept some level of debt relief, from zero to 100%, or walk out of the Euro. Merkel can support some level of debt relief, or let Greece walk.

There are principles on both sides. My sympathies lie much closer to Syriza, on the grounds that: austerity is generally bad economics; Greek residents count for as much (morally) as Northern Europeans; and the Greek meltdown, although abetted by poor national governance, was mainly a consequence of neoliberal economic policies driven by Germany and other Northern economies in their interests. However, a German Christian Democrat or a British Tory could make a sincere case against leniency, based on moral hazard, the virtues of fiscal responsibility, Greeks’ responsibility for Greek debt, and other such arguments.

My suggestion of the day is based on Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, the 1981 best-seller by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury. It is a popular and breezy book but based on some serious analysis. Fisher and Ury present two forms of positional bargaining in this table:

In this case, Mr. Tsipras could opt to be hard or soft in his approach to the European Central Bank and other key European players. Fisher and Ury would predict that either approach will yield a bad outcome for Greece and for Europe as a whole, because people have systematic weaknesses that make positional bargaining go badly, whether the players opt to be nice or tough. By the way, that prediction holds even if Mr. Tsipras is completely correct on all matters of principle: this is a game, not a seminar.

Instead, Fisher and Ury propose “negotiation on the merits,” which has four key features:

1. “Separate the people from the problem.” Create settings in which negotiators who have not publicly defined one another as adversaries are asked to address the problem and propose solutions.
2. Interests: Drop the debate about principles (ban words like “neoliberalism” and “fiscal responsibility”) and just try to maximize the outcomes for the various parties.
3. Multiply options: Don’t be satisfied with the choices that seem to confront the players right now, e.g., Greece either leaves or stays in the Eurozone. Instead, deliberately brainstorm a whole range of options. Could a massive new EU investment in some public good, such as climate mitigation, be designed especially to benefit Greece? Could a new loan package be offered simultaneously to Portugal, Spain, and Greece? (etc.)
4. Criteria: bring in a neutral party to establish concretely measurable objectives.  Don’t ask how much each player must (or should) give up, but rather whether the agreement maximizes these objectives.

There is much more in the book, but this offers a flavor.

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Two recent articles by Pankaj Mishra put very different valences on the same fundamental story.

In “Modi’s Idea of India” (The New York Times, Oct 24), Mishra decries the “intellectual insecurity, confusion and aggressiveness” of Hindu nationalists and links it to the “grandiose intellectual conceits” of Russian nationalism (resurgent under Putin) and “Japan’s descent into unhinged anti-Western imperialism in the early 20th century.” All are reactions to the perceived humiliations of European and North American colonialism that spawn ressentiment and “fantasies of racial-religious revenge and redemption.”

In “The Western Model is Broken” (The Guardian, Oct 14), Mishra decries the “brutality” that underpinned European industrialization and nation-building in the 19th century, which “turned out, in the next century, to be a mere prelude to the biggest bloodbath in history: two world wars, and ferocious ethnic cleansing that claimed tens of millions of victims.” The West’s “liberal democracies,” he argues, have been “experienced as ruthlessly imperialist by their colonial subjects.” Efforts to turn formerly imperialized nations into copies of the West have been cruel, arrogant, and foolish and have bred inevitable resentment and reaction.

It is interesting that Mishra chooses to denounce Modi, Putin, et al. in the American establishment newspaper, while he attacks “Davos Man,” Francis Fukuyama, and The Economist in the more leftish Guardian. But the overall story is consistent. The main dynamic of our age is not a struggle “between liberal democracy and totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism and communism.” That was “a largely intra-western dispute.” The “most significant event of the 20th century was decolonisation, and the emergence of new nation-states across Asia and Africa.” It is in that context that we must understand regimes as varied as Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey.

I would add that post-colonialism and anti-imperialism generally took the form of anti-capitalist, egalitarian, and statist movements from 1900-1980, but today’s critics of Western hegemony in countries like China, India, Russia, and Turkey are friendly to their own billionaires and business enterprises, tolerant of inequality, enthusiastic about consumer technology, and generally favorable to foreign direct investment. (See, e.g., “the Communist Party battles against equality“). They also defend traditional sexual mores against Western decadence. Perhaps, as Mishra says, the struggles between liberalism and authoritarianism were intramural Western affairs, yet it matters that the most powerful post-colonial societies now have conservative rather than socialist leaders–albeit with some variation.

One legacy of colonialism is that certain Good Ideas–e.g., accountability of governments to their people, individual rights, and cosmopolitanism–are now coded as “Western,” even though the main actual impact of the Western nations was depredation and humiliation. Under those circumstances, leaders who wish to ignore accountability, restrict personal rights, and close their countries to the world can present themselves as bulwarks against imperialism. But that is bad for their own people.

The Good Ideas always had precarious and limited followings in the countries that we call Western, which ought to be equally well known for trans-Atlantic slavery, fascism, and Stalinism. And the Good Ideas also have roots in other civilizations. It appears that modernity (marked by phenomena like individualism and deep social critique) was not invented for the first time in Europe ca. 1800 but has sprung up several times, e.g., in South India in the 15th century. That does not mean that every culture has been equally modernist at every point (far from it), but we should drop a simplistic equation of modernity with the West. This is hard to do, since modernity came with gunboats and Gatling guns to many parts of the world. Modernity is a mix of good and bad. Yet such institutional forms as competitive elections and freedom of speech are as much the birthright of Asians and Africans as of Europeans; and it would be the ultimate tragedy if they lost those rights in the name of anti-imperialism.

See also: “on modernity and the distinction between East and West“; “avoiding the labels of East and West” “on modernity and the distinction between East and West” and “the West and the rest.”

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The profound irony of this kind of story seems under-appreciated:

The Beijing-appointed leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, said Monday evening that it was unacceptable to allow his successors to be chosen in open elections, in part because doing so would risk giving poorer residents a dominant voice in politics. ….

Mr. Leung, who has received repeated backing from the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership, argued that the way to remedy social grievances was to expand the supply of housing and spur economic growth. He stressed the importance of maintaining the confidence of Hong Kong’s corporate elite. …

Recall that the Chinese Communist Party, which backs Mr. Leung, was once totally committed to Mao Zedong Thought, which officially remains one plank in its ramshackle platform. Mao Zedong Thought demands an implacable and total People’s War against all vestiges of capitalism, the Mass Line (perfect identification of the Party with the poor masses), and Cultural Revolution (a struggle against bourgeois tendencies that must continue even after the masses have seized all power in a violent revolution). Now the same organization seeks to “insulate candidates [for Hong Kong's government] from popular pressure to create a welfare state” and wants instead “the city government to follow more business-friendly policies to address economic inequality. …”

I’m not saying that Maoism was preferable to the present ideology. Maoism was worse, killing tens of millions and ruining countless additional lives. But the Party’s volte-face perfectly exemplifies the limited impact of ideas. During the Cultural Revolution, the government of the world’s biggest nation used every tool imaginable to stomp out capitalist enterprises, norms, and instincts. A generation later, the same government, dominated by the same families, won’t even allow a popular vote in Hong Kong because poor residents might request some modest restrains on global capitalism. So much for ideology. The Chinese Communist Party remains officially Maoist, but it is also a unitary hierarchy that monopolizes the legitimate use of force within the borders of China. Hence, in the long run, it will simply act in the self-interest of its leaders and rationalize its decisions using convenient arguments. The lesson is: pay careful attention to constitutional and institutional design.

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(Washington, DC) Russian media serves a steady diet of stories about how the crashed Malaysian airplane was filled with already-dead bodies; definitive proof that Ukraine shot it down to frame the Russian separatists; and even evidence that it’s the same Malaysian jet that vanished in March in the southern hemisphere, stored secretly and deployed now in a plot to hurt Russia. (For a sample of this coverage—I don’t know how representative—see the English version of Pravda today.) Maria Snegovaya reports that the Russian media generates very strong domestic popular support for Putin’s policies.

Western writers like Julia Ioffe criticize Russian propaganda. Russians write back in the comment fields to denounce such criticism. Many make tu quoque arguments: America does all of this, too (i.e., the propaganda, the killing, or both). They are correct that the following problems are not limited to Russia but are also prevalent in countries like the USA:

1. Deliberate manipulation of public opinion by governments and media companies;
2. Macho, militaristic nationalism and its reliable appeal to mass publics;
3. Confirmation bias, or the preference for information that reinforces one’s existing views and interests; and
4. Valuing the lives of one’s own countrymen far above the lives of foreigners.

Without these phenomena, it would be hard to explain why the US invaded Iraq after 9/11, how most Americans can forget US involvement in Central American genocide when the victims’ children try to migrate across our borders, or how we can tolerate assassinations by drone missile.

On the other hand, making the tu quoque argument is not good for Russia or for Russians. The United States and other democracies have mechanisms for error-correction and accountability that may be badly flawed and frayed today, but that are still hard-won and worth fighting to defend. They are absent in Putin’s Russia. Russians are the primary victims of that lack.

One mechanism is partisan competition. George W. Bush dominated American public opinion at the onset of the Iraq War. But a little-known Illinois state senator was one of those who strongly criticized the invasion. Six years and a few months later, that state senator succeeded Bush in the White House, having benefited politically from his opposition to the war. I am not satisfied by the Schumpeterian justification for elections—that they allow us to vote the incumbent idiots out when their performance becomes intolerable. But a Schumperian democracy is better than none at all. Incumbents are vulnerable; the opposition has powerful incentives to criticize them. Those protections are missing in Putin’s Russia.

Additional protections come from a genuinely independent civil society and press. I realize it is hard to demonstrate that the press and civil society are more effective in the US than in Russia, since they are not working all that well here. Mark Kleiman writes:

Russian mass media is now dominated by an extreme-nationalist lunatic fringe, built up by Putin and his cronies but no longer under their detailed control. … It’s a scary picture. What’s scarier is that, if you change the names, it applies to the relationships among the plutocrats, the GOP apparatchiki, and the world of the Murdochized press, the Koch-driven think-tanks, and Red Blogistan.

That is a claim of equivalence. I heard a similar argument in June from a Russian delegation of academics who visited me in my office. They insisted that they have more NGOs (millions!) than we do and that Putin funds them to ensure their independence from Western influence. I had no crisp refutation to offer, nor was I interested in asserting our system’s superiority. The worthwhile question is not which country has a better public sphere. But I am highly skeptical that Russians are, in fact, being served by an independent press or a robust civil society. If my skepticism is correct, then they and their neighbors (not Americans) are the ones who will suffer.

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I’ve had several moving conversations recently with democratic reformers from southeastern Europe. They are near despair about their respective countries. Instead of quoting their confidential assessments, I’ll cite this summary by Tamas Dezso Czigler of LSE:

I have previously written a great deal about Hungary; the latest development is that the government has changed the election rules once more, and introduced the anti-democratic pre-registration of voters, which further heavily distorts the election system. The government also continues to fire judges, even though the act which made this available was annulled by the Constitutional Court. In Romania, the problems are similar and obvious – the government simply does not respect democratic institutions like the Constitutional Court or the President.

Both Hungary and Slovakia have seen the possibly racially motivated murders of Roma in recent years (including children). In addition, Slovakia has introduced a heavily anti-democratic language act, which bans Hungarians from speaking Hungarian in government offices, even if the client and the officer both belong to the Hungarian minority. … There are also fears as to whether Croatia will be able to stay stable, since it has had an even darker history compared to the others. And we hear news about extreme corruption in Bulgaria every day.

Czigler does not happen to mention the strongly anti-Semitic rhetoric in Hungary and Romania. That isn’t the primary issue; I think Jewish residents will be safe against outright violence, and they are few. He is right to highlight the murders of Roma. However, given the historical role of anti-Semitism in this region, it is distressing that explicitly anti-Semitic parties can capture large shares of the vote. This is a sign of deeply anti-democratic and illiberal tendencies.

I would be the first to recognize that US states have also passed “anti-democratic pre-registration” provisions and laws targeting language minorities. But the question is not whose democracy is better. The question is what to do about anti-democratic threats in Europe, given the fragility of the continental system and the importance (to the whole world) of making it work.

Thus I wonder:

A nation must be a democracy to get into the EU. Once it’s in, what happens if it backtracks so that it would no longer meet the specific political criteria for membership? And what happens if a member drops all pretense of democracy and goes the way of Belarus?

EU members face judicial review at the European level. But the governments in Romania and Hungary are contemptuous of their own nations’ courts. What happens if EU members simply ignore the European Court of Human Rights?

I am told that some Hungarian Jewish families have fled to Austria. If true, it implies that there are already refugees of one EU nation in another one. How would the EU handle larger flows of political refugees?

The anti-democratic parties are mostly far-right and nationalistic. That may make coordination somewhat difficult, because a Greek nationalist doesn’t intrinsically care about Hungarian nationalism, for instance. In the 1930s, the attempt to build a Fascist International “was marred by serious conflicts between the participants.” Yet the far right of the various EU member states have common enemies and can do a lot of mischief together. Will they unite?

At least in Romania and Bulgaria, an underlying cause appears to be corruption, meaning the political power of economic oligarchs. Can European economic policy constrain them?

Will the EU ultimately make its weakest members more democratic and liberal, or will those states make the EU as a whole more authoritarian and illiberal?

How do members with deep civic traditions but poor current systems of government (Italy, Belgium) fit into the picture?

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Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. … Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

We cannot know whether the Egyptian revolution will prove a tragedy, a satisfying epic, or a farce, but the similarities to the French model are already notable:

1. Scattered tumultuous days of action begin with some kind of popular upheaval or violence and change the course of the revolution. Les grandes journées of the French Revolution included July 14, 1789 (the storming of the Bastille), August 10, 1792 (the monarchy overthrown), and 18 Brumaire, 1799 (Napoleon’s coup), among many others. In the Egyptian revolution, Jan. 25, 2011 (the Day of Anger), Feb. 11, 2011 (the Friday of Departure–Mubarak’s resignation), and July 3, 2013 (the coup against Morsi) play similar roles.
2. A mobilized urban populace in the huge capital city can bring down the government, but the urbanites may be at odds with the much more numerous rural population.
3. The constitution is problematic–both in content and origin–but it offers the “rule of law.”
4. The revolution is international. (Compare the Brabant Revolution of 1789 and Syria in 2012-13). The reaction is also international. (Today, Bashar al Assad plays the role of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II; Benjamin Netanyahu is William Pitt the Younger.)
5. The ancien regime still has its supporters, who are perceived as threats to the revolution.
6. Military leaders express support for the revolutionary constitution but are capable of taking over at will.
7. Outside the government and official parliament, strongly ideological groups (Jacobins and Montagnards, Muslim Brothers and Salafis) debate and organize collective action.

To be sure, there are differences. For example, the most radical French revolutionaries were anti-clerical deists, but one form of radicalism in Egypt is ultra-religious and clerical. Another difference: the reactionaries outside Egypt are not massing on its borders.

Professor Joseph Mossad says the term “Arab Spring” is “part of a US strategy of controlling [the movement's] aims and goals” in favor American-style liberal democracy. The phrase alludes to the “Prague Spring” liberal revolutions across Europe in 1848 (which prompted Marx’s article cited above). I don’t know if Mossad is right, but certainly analogizing current and past events has political significance. At the same time, Marx was right that the “tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” and revolutionaries “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.” So analogies are inevitable. The question is whether the Egyptians will borrow from Paris, 1789, Saint Petersburg, 1917,  Cairo, 1952, Tehran, 1979, or some other model.

I would recommend Prague, 1989. The Velvet Revolution (imitated by the various “color” revolutions of 2009) was not only nonviolent, but the revolutionaries were intentionally self-limiting. (See Timothy Garten Ash’s analysis.) But clearly, a whole substantive view of politics is built into that view.

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