Author
|
Topic: Can liberal democracy survive the 21st century?
|
500_Apples
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 12684
|
posted 08 July 2008 06:59 PM
I was reading a recent issue of Newsweek on a night bus to Santiago, and it had a ¨global¨ poll of confidence in world leaders. The theme of the story was that strongmen like Jintao and Putin did well, but not democrats like Sarkozy. Gordon Brown was the third most popular leader among those available to chose. It´s already under attack at home, with elements such as the patrio act in the USA and the police state in the UK. In Europe, there´s a growing disregard for democracy, as the continent shifts power from elected asemblies to appointed bureaucrats in Brussels. What seems like a more serious threat is international competition. Certain states that are not liberal democracies such as the united arab emirates, China, Russia are doing very well... if they keep it up, they will be on ¨tops¨, and then their way of doing thing will be the model to follow and the model that is followed. It will be a historically interesting year as it will be the first one in like six, seven or eight hundred years that the occident is not dominant.
From: Montreal, Quebec | Registered: Jun 2006
| IP: Logged
|
|
Catchfire
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4019
|
posted 09 July 2008 12:09 AM
quote: The question is often asked: given the explosion of capitalism in China, when will democracy assert itself there, as capital’s ‘natural’ political form of organisation? The question is often put another way: how much faster would China’s development have been if it had been combined with political democracy? But can the assumption be made so easily? In a TV interview a couple of years ago, Ralf Dahrendorf linked the increasing distrust of democracy in post-Communist Eastern Europe to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a ‘vale of tears’. After socialism breaks down the limited, but real, systems of socialist welfare and security have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessarily painful. The same goes for Western Europe, where the passage from the welfare state model to the new global economy involves painful renunciations, less security, less guaranteed social care. Dahrendorf notes that this transition lasts longer than the average period between democratic elections, so that there is a great temptation to postpone these changes for short-term electoral gain. Fareed Zakaria has pointed out that democracy can only ‘catch on’ in economically developed countries: if developing countries are ‘prematurely democratised’, the result is a populism that ends in economic catastrophe and political despotism. No wonder that today’s economically most successful Third World countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule.Following this path, the Chinese used unencumbered authoritarian state power to control the social costs of the transition to capitalism. The weird combination of capitalism and Communist rule proved not to be a ridiculous paradox, but a blessing. China has developed so fast not in spite of authoritarian Communist rule, but because of it. There is a further paradox at work here. What if the promised second stage, the democracy that follows the authoritarian vale of tears, never arrives? This, perhaps, is what is so unsettling about China today: the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past – of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, took place from the 16th to the 18th century – but a sign of our future? What if the combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle to it?
Slavoj Žižek, in a letter to the London Review of Books.
From: On the heather | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|