Towards a Multipolar and Diverse World?

2013/05/23

abstract

I. Universal History and Historical Determinism

Tens of thousands of year’s long process of conquering of our planet by Homo Sapiens was paralleled by the process of dissimilation, i.e. we as individuals as well as societies became gradually more and more different from each other. Today, when the world has virtually become a global village, a slow and painful process of assimilation has set in. Rather, there are two contradictory, competing and even canceling each other out processes: the world as a whole is becoming more and more homogeneous while most individual societies are becoming more heterogeneous. Relative homogenization of the world is not something completely new. Empires, both ancient and modern, contributed to this process. The end of the bi-polar international system, collapse of the USSR and opening up of China to the world mark a new accelerating homogenization of the world. In many ways it is a spontaneous process. Interacting societies borrow from each other what works best. Globalization and especially migration waves as one of its manifestations, being a source of homogenization of the world, also leads to the heterogenization of individual societies. These controversial parallel processes have already created serious problems. The world has become virtually one, interconnected but also unmanageable. Besides spontaneous homogenization of the world there have been conscious attempts to make it more homogeneous. Christianity and Islam have both either through conquest or missionary activities tried to make the world the same in terms of faith. The ideas of the Enlightenment, based on the belief in the universality of reason and its eventual triumph over emotions, spontaneity and irrationality, have been a powerful source of attempts of remaking the world in accordance with elaborate blueprints. Marxism was the most prominent emanation of the Enlightenment that planned to consciously redesign the world according to societal laws that Marx had discovered. Historical determinism and voluntarism joined forces: having discovered iron laws that would inevitably lead all societies towards the full emancipation of humankind, Marxists’ task was to facilitate the birth pangs of the new world, to be its midwife. Like Marxism, liberal democratic mental picture of world's history is a combination of deterministic and voluntaristic elements; they both have their roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview and especially in Enlightenment’s legacy. Though pointing at different directions they are methodologically close. Being certain that eventually all societies evolve towards free market liberal democracy, many liberal-democrats also believe in their duty to help other societies quicker achieve their destiny. This belief, and acting upon it, has been especially strong among Anglo-Saxon societies. Walter Russell Mead speaks of it as “...the ‘whig’ narrative - a theory of history that sees the slow and gradual march of progress in a free society as the dominant force not only in Anglo-American history but in the wider world as well.”[①] The gist of such a view is that the world is almost inevitably led by the Anglo-Saxon countries and for other societies not to be thrown, using the Marxist lexicon, into the dustbin of history, they volens nolens have to become more and more like Anglo-Saxon societies. Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is seen as bit of a caricature of liberal democratic visions of the future, but more moderate and therefore less prominent versions of this vision are as influential as ever. Using the “Marxist” method Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, for example, observe that “The foreign policy of the liberal states should continue to be based on the broad assumption that there is ultimately one path to modernity -- and that it is essentially liberal in character’ and that ‘liberal states should not assume that history has ended, but they can still be certain that it is on their side.”[②] This is only a slightly moderated version of deterministic explanation of history. Slavoj Žižek is right observing that “it is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the ‘End of History’, but most people today are Fukuyamean.”[③] And here, once again, voluntarism, feeding on its opposite – determinism, steps in. These are the human agents who are on the “right side of history” that realize humankind’s destiny. Political regimes and economic systems that are on the “wrong side of history” have to go. Many liberal democrats, sincerely believing in the ultimate triumph of their ideology, consider that the best way to promote it is by way of example and assisting those who have chosen to follow it. However, there are also liberal interventionists who believe in the necessity of actively enlarging the circle of liberal democracies. In the United States, liberal interventionists such as Samantha Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter have joined forces with neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan or Randy Scheunemann. For the latter interventionist policies are dictated primarily by pragmatic interests (oil, gas, strategic benefits), while liberal interventionists believe in their mission to make the world a better place for all the peoples.

It is obvious that history is not an impersonal perpetuum mobile but is done by men and women. Using Marx’s words, “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.”[④] What studies taking longer historical perspective show is that it is necessary to plan for the future and that past and present trends are of some assistance in this endeavour. However, our plans will never realise as intended and therefore we have to be ready to constantly correct them. Most importantly, history doesn't move to any specific end. History is a combination of three categories of factors: deterministic (not everything is possible and some things are really impossible, at least for the time being); voluntaristic (quite a few things indeed depend on our purposeful choices and efforts) and chance (many things just happen and they depend neither on our rational or irrational choices nor are they predetermined by any discoverable pre-existing factors). Triumphant historical unidirecionality is not only simplistic and wrong; acting upon it may be also extremely dangerous. The whole history of humankind testifies that there is no final form of social, political or economic arrangement of society. Therefore, Žižek is right that “we should thus ruthlessly abandon the prejudice that the linear time of evolution is on our side,” that History is “working for us.” On whose side is history becomes known ex post facto and usually long after the fact. We can only make more or less educated guesses.

II. Problems of Liberal Democracy and Democratic Capitalism.

Although it is true that the more globalized the world, the more homogeneous it becomes, this process is slow, goes by starts and fits and yesterday’s tendencies may not be indicative of tomorrow’s directions. Moreover, globalization has its dangers as well as limits. It may well be that at least in certain areas in order to meet new challenges societies would find it necessary to curb certain aspects and effects of globalization. Although so far it has been the West that has been the engine of globalization and homogenization of the world as well as its main beneficiary, it will not stay like that forever. In human history there has not been any political or economic system, empire or great power whose dominance has not come to an end, whose ways of doing things, even if widely copied by others, have not become outdated. Because globalization has accelerated changes in many parts of the world, the rise and fall of great powers will also happen faster than ever before. Even if it wasn’t for the current financial and economic crisis in the West, there is no doubt that the East and first of all China, using inter alia Western scientific and social achievements, combining them with their own traditions and inventions, will change world's balance of power. Trying to impose, even for benign ends, one’s own model on other societies would put an end to development. Not only through borrowing from others but also through social experimentation and competition has humankind progressively evolved.

Francis Fukuyama writes that “Liberal democracy is the default ideology around much of the world today in part because it responds to and is facilitated by certain socioeconomic structures.”[⑤] However, globalization and development of technology have eroded the relative strength of the middle class - the main pillar of liberal democracy. Societies are increasingly becoming more unequal and polarised. In Fukuyama’s view, such a tendency undermines the structure on which liberal democratic ideology and practices are based. It is difficult to disagree with him. If, say, Great Britain will continue losing its industrial base, which had made possible its dominant position in the world, and carry on relying on the City as a source of its revenue, it may for some time guarantee a GDP growth but the society will become ever more unequal and the middle class smaller and weaker. It would be imprudent to remain content with Churchill’s words, which have become almost a mantra, that “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” There are several shortcomings of liberal democracy that have become visible as the world becomes more and more globalized. First, modern democracy emerged in parallel with, evolved within, and its thriving was dependent on so-called nation-states. Historically, there was a positive correlation between democracy and nationalism. Today, however, most societies have become multicultural; they are increasingly more multiethnic and multi-religious. Nationalism has ceased to play any positive emancipatory role; its impact is increasingly negative. Equally damaging is the correlation, especially in the United States, between money and democracy. As Jeffrey Sachs writes, “Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying, and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry,” and claims that America is becoming a “corporatocracy, a political system in which powerful corporate interest groups dominate the policy agenda.”[⑥] Another shortcoming of liberal democracy is an institution at the very core of democracy – periodic elections. They are causing short-termism in policy-making of practically all Western democracies. The inability to take necessary measures in the face of current financial crises is only one of the signs of it. Even more serious are external problems of democracy. Institutions of modern democracy, having emerged and adapted for the frame of the nation-state are not suitable for international relations and don’t work when clear divisions between external and domestic affairs become blurred. Would democracy in external relations mean “one state, one vote”? In that case Nauru and China would have the same weight which from the point of view of the “one man, one vote” system looks unfair and even absurd. Most populations of the EU member-states constantly complain about the alienation of European institutions from people, about the democracy deficit within the Union. There is even a positive (or negative, depending on how one looks at the problem) correlation between the power and effectiveness of international bodies and their ‘democratic’ credentials. The more “democratic” is an international body, the less power or authority it enjoys. Within the UN it is its Security Council with its 5 permanent members that is the most powerful and effective organ.

Besides the crisis of liberal democracy there is also a crisis of capitalism. Free market and liberal democracy, phenomena that presume each other, are also in a constant rivalry. The freer is a market, the greater is economic inequality; the greater inequality, the less would there be democracy, and vice versa. Strong democracy almost inevitably bridles market freedoms. Economic inequality inevitably increases political inequality, while political equality puts breaks on the widening economic inequality. In Western European liberal democracies these two spheres – political and economic – while supporting each other also constantly soften each other’s negative impacts. The United States, in that respect too, considerably differs from Europe. Cambridge Professor John Dunn writes that “America today remains a society uncomfortable with every surviving vestige of explicit privilege, but remarkably blithe in face of the most vertiginous of economic gulfs, and comprehensively reconciled to the most obtrusive privileges of wealth as such. Behind this outcome lies the continuing vitality of its economy, the real source of the victory of the partisans of ‘distinction, or the English school of economists’.”[⑦] There the market has prevailed over democracy while, say, in Sweden, ruled for long periods by social democrats, there has been less room, as Dunn puts it, for “distinctions and opulence”, i.e. democracy has exercised greater constraints on the market. Today, when there are serious doubts about “the continuing vitality” of American economy one may start questioning whether equality of opportunity without much effect on equality of outcome is not too narrow a concept. John Dunn also observes that within the liberal democratic movement “the partisans of the order of egoism”, i.e. capitalists, have defeated “the partisans of equality”, i.e. democrats. One of the important causes of equality’s defeat in the hands of economic egoism has been that the inflexible instruments for attempting to realize equality and the rigidities inherent in its pursuit have blunted equality's appeal as a goal. Both the French and Russian revolutions, where contrary to the American revolution, the aim was not so much, as Hannah Arendt put it, “freedom from oppression” as “freedom from want”, and one of the main requirements therefore was égalité, have contributed to the existing balance (or imbalance) in today’s understanding of the relationship between democracy and liberty. Arendt wrote that “the inescapable fact was that liberation from tyranny spelled freedom only for the few and was hardly felt by the many who remained loaded down by their misery. These had to be liberated once more, and compared to this liberation from the yoke of necessity, the original liberation from tyranny must have looked like child’s play.”[⑧] The fact that radical attempts of liberation from “the yoke of necessity” and creation of more equal societies have led to tyranny shouldn’t compromise the values of equality and freedom from want in the eyes of thoughtful individuals. It is possible to abuse all values but this doesn’t mean that we should therefore reject them. What is needed is a critical mind able to distinguish between a value and its abuse. Today, advanced liberal democracies have in principle got rid of the “yoke of tyranny” and have alleviated the “yoke of necessity” for most of their people. For many other societies both tasks still constitute formidable challenges and even mature democracies have to constantly find new balances between freedom and equality. After the collapse of communism, the conflictual aspects of the “capitalism- democracy” relationship are becoming more and more visible. Therefore one may be justified in asking whether the “sell-by date” of at least some of the political and economic institutions that the West is trying to export has not already passed.

After WWII many Western European states found a remedy against the excesses of wild capitalism in the welfare state that seemed to be able to find a satisfactory balance between liberté, egalité and fraternité. However, today the nation-state and national market economy – these cradles of human rights and democracy – are both in the process of radical change. The state has lost not only its ability to control world financial flows but also its ability to protect its own population from negative effects of fluctuations of the world markets. The unfettered global market tends to drag down the protection of economic and social rights to the level of the lowest common denominator (e.g. cheap labour and longer working hours in many Asian societies have an impact on employment and social protection in all OECD countries). Political rights are also negatively affected by the process of globalisation. The inability of democratically elected governments to protect their constituencies from negative global effects means that democracy has become less effective. In a global world, capital benefits from a “race to the bottom”, i.e. it moves to places where the costs of labor are lower thereby dragging down social safety nets also in richer countries. The same is the effect of increasing migration from the poorer regions to the richer ones. Therefore, when social democratic or socialist parties come to power, they are unable to continue with traditional policies of welfare states. As the right and right-of-centre policies, which until recently were trumpeted as the panacea for all the socioeconomic ills, have bankrupted the Western world, the left and left-of-centre parties have not been able to offer any plausible answers to today’s challenges.  

The capitalist system, competing with the economically ineffective, politically oppressive and ideologically utopian communist system, turned out to be much more effective and freer than its nemesis. The triumph of capitalism over a failed social experiment shouldn’t make us complacent and closed to the search for remedies, reforms and even alternatives to the existing dominant system that is clearly in crisis. Jeffrey Sachs writes that today “America’s weaknesses are warning signs for the rest of the world” and that “the society that led the world in financial liberalization, round-the-clock media saturation, television based election campaigns, is now revealing the downside of a society that has let market institutions run wild over politics and public values” [⑨](emphasis added, RM).

III. Any Viable Alternatives?

It would be wrong to ask: where is the world going to? The very fact of putting such a general question implies that we all are moving in the same direction, that we accept a unidirectional, linear evolution of the world towards a singular end. Not many would disagree with the statement that the shift in power and wealth from West to East in the twenty-first century is probably as inevitable as the shift from East to West that happened in the nineteenth century. The rapid rise of China and increasing potential of Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam and the earlier economic miracles of Asian tigers have led some authors to write, often with apprehension, about authoritarian capitalism as a potential model for the future. So, Israeli strategist Azar Gat observes that “authoritarian capitalist states, today exemplified by China and Russia, may present a viable alternative path to modernity, which in turn suggests that there is nothing inevitable about liberal democracy’s ultimate victory – or future dominance.”[⑩] One of the most eloquent critics of all forms of capitalism Slavoj Žižek warns that “the virus of this authoritarian [Lee Kuan Yew’s and Den Xiaoping’s] capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe.” For some societies, like China or even Russia, it may be indeed that some form of authoritarian capitalism will be their model of development while, say, European nations may continue experimenting with various forms of liberal-democratic market economy. The choice of different models depends on various factors such as history, religion, size, geography and demography. However, it is important to note that those Asian tigers became gradually less authoritarian and more democratic. And big ones are not so averse to the democratic ideals either. As Kishore Mahbubani observes, though China remains a “politically closed society”, it is “in social and intellectual terms an increasingly open society.”[11] China is also experimenting with political reforms, though slowly and cautiously and rightly so. Azar Gat himself observes that “institutionally, the regime in China is continuously broadening its base, co-opting the business elites into the party, democratizing the party itself, and experimenting with various forms of popular participation, including village and some town elections, public opinion surveys, and focus group polling-all of which are intended to ensure that the government does not lose the public's pulse.”[12] Shedding some of its authoritarian traits China is indeed acquiring a few democratic ones. This is an important trend but not necessarily beneficial for the West. More democratic China will not necessarily be more amenable for Western interests. Certainly, Chinese democracy will be with “Chinese characteristics”. Turkey’s evolution under the government of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party may well show the way for other Muslim countries. There, the combination of market economy, Islam and democracy is different from Western liberal democracies to which Turkey in its ambition to join the European Union tried to resemble. Samuel Huntington already some years ago insightfully predicted that “at some point Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.”[13] It seems that this time has come. Turkey has become not only economically more successful and politically more assertive but also more authentic.

Why cannot the world consist of a social-democratic Europe, a libertarian capitalist America (together with other Anglo-Saxon societies), state-capitalist China or even Russia? A serious problem with such a scenario is that all these forms have already revealed their deficiencies and limits. Authoritarian capitalism may indeed be more efficient in responding to new challenges but its main problem is that every authoritarianism limits human freedom, the latter having not only intrinsic value but also being a vehicle of development. Moreover, successful authoritarianisms tend to become more liberal and democratic, which is of course a welcome trend. Today we see three competing and struggling forms of capitalism: liberal-democratic one of Anglo-Saxon type, social-democratic one of Scandinavian countries, Germany and some other Western European countries, and state capitalism exemplified first of all by China and Russia. One tendency could be a kind of peaceful competition in the process of which all models would be ready to borrow from each other what works best. It may well be that while the East would gradually become more democratic and liberal, the West, in order to regain some governance lost to market forces, would have to increase the role of the state both domestically as well as internationally. Sergei Karaganov has observed that “The existing model of Western capitalism based on a society of almost universal affluence and advanced democracy cannot withstand a new competition. Not only will the authoritarian regimes have to drift towards greater democracy in the medium term. Western democracies, too, will have to drift towards more authoritarianism. This will be a retreat, a post-modern theory of convergence.”[14] Cum grano salis, there seems to be some truth in such a statement. However, if the Eastern drift towards greater liberty and democracy is well within the overall long-term of evolution of humankind, a widespread and sustainable drift towards more authoritarianism goes against such tendency. Therefore, the term “more authoritarianism” may not accurately reflect what the West needs to effectively compete with the rising East. Rather, one may think of more collectivism instead of glorifying rampant individualism à la Ayn Rand; rights balanced with responsibilities; greater role of the state not so much as the redistributer of wealth but as the protector of people from negative effects of global markets; and acceptance of the truth that there is no single true socioeconomic and political arrangement suitable for all. Charles Kupchan predicts that “it is more likely that emerging powers will follow their own unique paths to modernity as they rise, ensuring that the next world will not just be multipolar, but also politically diverse” and that therefore “the emerging world is poised to consist of a multiplicity of different kinds of regimes; considerable political diversity, not political homogeneity among Western lines, lies ahead.” [15]

IV. Current Regime Changes: Socio-economic and political Problems

Contemporary societies consist of three main interconnected layers: political and economic systems and civil society. The latter includes not only so-called civil society organizations. It also comprises of historical traditions, religious norms and organizations, culture, family structures and similar institutions. The relative interconnectedness, independence and impact of these layers on each other differ from society to society. Ideally none of them should dominate. Under totalitarian regimes civil society is virtually absent. In neo-liberal democracies, especially in the United States, the economic system enjoys the commanding heights. The call for a ‘small state’ is central to such a vision. There is no actually existing country where civil society would dominate the other two layers; the increase of its role would probably be an indicator of progressive development of any society. When the political system dominates there is a threat of the emergence of dictatorial regimes while in the case of the economic system’s domination there is a danger that the society may move towards a winner-takes-all kind of entity. Though in practice there is no civil-society-dominant countries, it may well be that in somewhere attempts to weaken the role of the state may lead, instead of democracy, to anarchy.

The central aspect of any political system is the state. According to the traditional Marxist theory, it is a part of the superstructure while at its basis are economic relations. Although critics of Marx have oversimplified his views accusing him of economic determinism, there is no doubt that Marx and even more so “official” Marxism believed that economic relations exercise, at least at the end of the day, determinative effect on the other layers of society. Today, in liberal democratic countries, this Marx’s proposition is becoming increasingly true. It is often written that as Chinese economy develops, its political system will either change to correspond to the needs of the economic development or otherwise (i.e. if it doesn’t become more like Western liberal-democratic systems), the political system will put breaks on country's economic development. As a general proposition such a statement is true and expresses the view that there has to be a congruence between different layers of society. It is important to underline that civil society is not less important than the first two layers. Often it is even more important in the sense that it is the most conservative and less amenable to change. But without changing it, transformations in political and economic layers become either impossible, distorted or unsustainable. Current attempts of regime changes in Asia, Northern Africa or the Middle East are attempts of exporting Western political and economic systems to societies where civil societies have been absent, severely suppressed or very different from those in the West. That is why such exports often end up in chaos and anarchy instead of democracy; instead of markets based on rule of law feudal markets, where all lucrative businesses are controlled by central and local strongmen, emerge. These examples show that while it is relatively easy to implant formal features of Western political and economic systems in non-Western societies, in the absence of adequate responsive civil societies they acquire distorted forms.

The history, and especially the sequence, of the evolution of the Western world bear witness to the idea that in non-Western world the proverbial cart is often ahead of the horse. Francis Fukuyama makes an important point observing that 'the sequencing of political development in Western Europe was highly unusual when compared to other parts of the world. Individualism on a social level appeared centuries before the rise of either modern states or capitalism; a rule of law existed before political power was concentrated in the hands of centralized governments’, and that there emerged “an unusual situation in which rule of law became imbedded in European society even before the advent not just of democracy and accountable government but also the modern state-building process itself.” This observation is true and has been corroborated by other authors. Therefore, it is amazing that notwithstanding that and the fact that the whole Fukuyama’s book shows that depending on peculiarities of cultures and traditions political history of societies take different forms, he writes that “one of the great mistakes of early modernization theory, beyond the error in thinking that politics, economics, and culture had to be congruent with one another, was to think that transitions between the ‘stages’ of history were clean and irreversible.”[16] It is easy to agree with his point on the transitions between the “stages” of history, but his own analysis pays tribute to the view that certain congruence between history and sequencing of evolution of economic and political systems as well as civil society are historical facts. An important difference between the evolution of the Western and non-Western world is that while the former evolved on their own, without much, if any, interference from outside, other societies have felt the heavy impact of the Western civilization. In their evolution this congruence and sequencing, which in the West emerged naturally through the trial and error method, is absent.

There is another common methodological element, besides their deterministic-voluntaristic unidirectional approach to history, between the Soviet brand of Marxism and current liberal democracy. The Soviet Union, trying to extend its sway over Third World countries, prompted them to choose the only true – i.e. socialist – way of development. For this purpose Soviet experts invented a peculiar version of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. In the Marxist orthodoxy, for a society to reach the stage of socialism, it was necessary to pass through capitalism, which would generate the material preconditions for a sustainable socialist revolution and also create the proletariat – the “gravedigger of capitalism”, which then – exercising its dictatorship – would lead the society to communism. According to this theory, countries like Mongolia, Vietnam or Cuba could not become socialist. Obviously, such a conclusion would not be in the interest or to the liking of the Soviet leaders. This would have meant that those countries would have fallen into Washington’s sphere of influence. Therefore a theory was invented asserting that in the absence of a proletariat at home, the world socialist system could play the role of “proletariat’s dictatorship”, i.e. the absence of internal conditions for socialism could be compensated by external support.

Today various theories of promotion of democracy use, mutatis mutandi, similar reasoning. If there are no internal conditions for the emergence of liberal democracy and especially for its sustainability in a specific country, the European Union, OSCE, NATO or Washington alone or together with a “coalition of willing” would shore up and guide new regimes towards liberal democracy. I do not want to equate the Soviet attempts to spread its totalitarian ideology with all the efforts, even if misguided and hypocritical, to widen the camp of democracies. If a society becomes prosperous and democratic due, inter alia, to external efforts, even if outsiders are not motivated by noble and altruistic concerns, so be it. Moreover, there are indeed governments, international organisations and other bodies that carry out rather painstaking and usually unappreciated work helping other societies gradually democratise and modernise. My point is about the limits of external efforts in the absence of sufficient internal factors that are necessary for democratisation and about the wishful thinking in the elaboration of theories that correspond to one’s interests, be they altruistic or self-serving.

The latest wave of regime change has been dubbed the “Arab spring”. Like the “colour revolutions”, they too had internal causes as main engines though external factors played a significant role. One of the most important lessons of the “Arab spring” should be, in my opinion, that external interference usually makes things worse, not better. The rule of the thumb should be: don’t support dictators but don’t undermine them either. Often anti-Western attitudes are counter-reactions to Western policies aimed at supporting pro-Western governments in power. Castros’ Cuba and Ayatollahs’ Iran are both reactions to Washington’s support of the regimes of Batista and Reza Pahlavi. Equally, one shouldn’t be certain that the people of Iraq or Afghanistan will warmly remember those who liberated them from Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. The situation in both countries is far from optimistic. According to a recent classified coalition report on Afghanistan, “American and other coalition forces here are being killed in increasing numbers by the very Afghan soldiers they fight alongside and train, in attacks motivated by deep-seated animosity between the supposedly allied forces.”[17] The day when that report were leaked, The International Herald Tribune reported that four French troops had been killed and sixteen more were wounded when a soldier from the Afghan National Army whom the French were training, opened fire. The aggressive external involvement in the formation and support of the Karzai Government has done little good either for Afghanistan or for those who have been involved in the country. Not only the Taliban and their Pakistani supporters but also the Afghan society as a whole are bracing themselves for the time when the Western forces leave the country. As the leaked in February 2012 NATO report observes, “Afghans frequently prefer Taliban governance over the Afghan [Karzai] government, usually as a result of government corruption.”[18]

Current Islamization of some Middle Eastern countries as a result of the “Arab spring” is both inevitable and in the long run potentially beneficial for peoples of the region. It is inevitable because these are Muslim societies on whom for long periods alien models had been imposed. It is beneficial in the long run because even if in some of these countries some categories of people may see their status worsening it is better to start a long and painful process of evolution towards a free society earlier rather than later. Quite a few in the West, and especially in Israel, worry about Islamization of the Middle East. However, it may well be that when the West ceases to tell the East how to live and helps impartially resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which many regard as a litmus test for the East-West relations in the Middle East, then Western and Muslim countries may develop good-neighbourly relations of equals notwithstanding differences in cultures and interests. After the first round of Egyptian parliamentary elections Bobby Ghosh made an interesting comment, “The Islamists, it turned out, understand democracy much better than the liberals do.” Indeed, in a country without liberal traditions democracy will not bring liberals to power. We see that Turkey can combine political Islam and democracy; why not Egypt or some other Muslim states? In the Middle East such a combination will certainly have better perspectives that liberal democracy. Amitai Etzioni maps some non-traditional fault lines between what he calls 'Warriors' and 'Illiberal Moderates'. The majority of people in non-Western world are not “Warriors” ready to use violence for the promotion of their values; neither are they liberal-democrats. They are “Illiberal Moderates”, “those who disavow violence (in most circumstances) but who do not necessarily favor a liberal-democratic regime or the full program of human rights.”[19] As in many countries they constitute absolute majority of the population, it is necessary to work with them and not to rely on a thin layer of liberals who lack domestic legitimacy. Trying to convert “Illiberal Moderates” into liberal-democrats would be not only futile but also counter-productive. Thomas Friedman once put one of the most pertinent questions concerning democratization of some societies without answering it: “Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq was the way Iraq was?”[20] A general answer probably has to be that Iraq was ready for Saddam and a person like Saddam couldn’t have come to power and stayed there for decades in a society that would have been very different from Iraq. William H. Sullivan, the American Ambassador to Teheran in the Carter Administration, wrote with hindsight: “From top to bottom, Iran was and is a far more complex society than many of our policymakers have understood. In the absence of such understanding, simplistic policies, no matter how nobly motivated, may often go awry.” He added that in response to his rather diplomatic comments on democracy in Iran the Shah “used to say that he would like to be like the King of Sweden, if only he had a nation full of Swedes.”[21] Though Shah’s comment may well have been self-serving this does not necessarily mean that it is wrong. Most Middle Eastern societies don't have enough Swedes for liberal democracy taking roots.

V. Current Regime Changes: International, including Legal, Problems

In his 28 March 2011 speech on NATO’s military operation against Gaddafi’s Libya President Barak Obama declared that America had the responsibility to stop the looming genocide in Benghazi. This operation had the blessing of the Security Council and therefore was arguably lawful. “Arguably” since like in several other UN sanctioned interventions, the practicalities and consequences of the intervention went beyond what was mandated by the Security Council. The operation on the protection of civilians turned into the war on regime change. However, even if we agree that NATO’s mission was a mission creep and that it went beyond the Security Council mandate, a question remains: is it at all possible to protect a population from a genocidal government without overthrowing it? For an effective and sustainable protection of a population there usually has to be a change of the government that either orders acts of genocide to be carried out, condones or is unable to stop them. The overthrow of the regimes of Idi Amin in Uganda, Pol Pot in the Democratic Kampuchea in 1979 and the Indian 1971-72 intervention in the Eastern Pakistan that put an end to massive crimes against civilian populations ended up with the change of regimes that had committed those atrocities (the Indian intervention it led to the breakup of Pakistan and the creation of a new state - Bangladesh). However, several caveats are necessary. Foreign meddling may lead to the formation of a government that doesn’t correspond to the characteristics of society and isn’t therefore sustainable. Usually external actors use their own yardsticks to measure the suitability of political elites to govern target countries: the more western they look and sound, the better. However, in most non-Western countries such leaders are usually the least suitable to govern and the absence of domestic legitimacy cannot be compensated by external support. There is something significant in the fact that these three large-scale successful foreign military responses to humanitarian catastrophes were carried out by non-Western nations. None of these interventions was sanctioned by the United Nations and the intervening states preferred to refer to self-defence as justification instead of “purely humanitarian concerns”. Naturally, in all these cases there were other concerns and interests present, if not dominant. None of them could be qualified as operations of self-defence. One of the reasons of their success may have been that while overthrowing bloody dictators and putting an end to Islamabad’s repressions in Eastern Pakistan, the intervening states didn’t attempt to put in place pro-Western and Western sounding and looking governments. Sometimes democracies may have even more unsettling impact on international relations than non-democracies. The United States – the most powerful liberal democracy (and there is no doubt that the US is democracy whatever its faults) and its closest allies have had quite a disruptive effect due to their misconceived and incompetent attempts to promote democratic values in regions where there are no fertile grounds for such values taking root. Disastrous results of such policies can be most vividly seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they also spectacularly failed when applied in the 1990s towards Yeltsin’s Russia. Nor have they been unalloyed blessing in the case of so-called “colour revolutions”.

International law provides for so-called interventions by invitation, which the Institut de Droit International in its 2011 resolution has more correctly characterised as “military assistance on request”, in “situations of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence and other acts of similar nature, including acts of terrorism.” The Institut explicitly excluding from the scope of permitted military assistance on request situations of non-international armed conflicts, i.e. in civil wars. The reason being that interventions on the side of the government (it goes without saying that any military intervention on the invitation of the opposition is illegal) in civil war situations may undermine people’s right to self-determination. Of course, even in cases of internal disturbances and tensions intervention by invitation may enter into conflict with the principle of self-determination. Therefore, Institut’s Resolution prohibits direct military assistance to foreign governments by sending armed forces in cases when such assistance violates the right of peoples to self-determination or “generally accepted standards of human rights and in particular when its object is to support an established government against its own population.”

Intervention in the both categories of situations may be necessary on humanitarian grounds. However, then Security Council’s authorization is needed. In such cases, if the target of a UN sanctioned intervention is governmental forces, which are suppressing a popular revolt, a regime change may indeed result. However, it should never be the raison d'être of an intervention. In extreme circumstances, when crimes against humanity or acts of genocide are committed, and when the seriousness of such human rights violations outweighs the prohibition to use military force (a Rwanda 1994 type situation) even a non-Security Council sanctioned intervention may be justified. However, the change of the existing political regime, economic structure and civil society institutions, if necessary, should be matter for the people themselves to resolve.

VI. Towards a Normative Synthesis?

Let us finish with where we started: the world as a whole is slowly becoming more homogeneous while most individual societies are becoming, and not so slowly, more heterogeneous. Professor Amitai Etzioni’s comment that “the world actually is moving towards a new synthesis between the West’s great respects for individual rights and choices and the East’s respect for social obligations; between the West’s preoccupation with autonomy and the East’s preoccupation with social order; between Western legal and political egalitarianism and Eastern authoritarianism”[22] is well within this panorama. However, it would be counter-productive and dangerous to try to artificially accelerate the move towards greater homogeneity (be it a world of liberal democracies, a Islamic Caliphate or a Sino-centric international system). Equally, it would be unwise and almost impossible to try to stop these processes. What we represented by states, international organizations, civil society groups, business leaders and individuals, can do is to manage them.   

Today it is not Orwellian Big Brother or Leviathan that is the most realistic and immediate danger; in many parts of the world the failure or total collapse of states, not their strength and stability, has been the main cause of massive human suffering. The clear and present danger is, rather, an unfettered global market without any democratic control. It is becoming a “big brother” whose interference with individual liberties, though more anonymous and less direct than that of the state, is equally nefarious. One of the most important tasks of states is the management of global issues such as the globalised economy, the prevention of environmental degradation, the maintenance of national and international security, and qualified, contingent and contextual promotion of democracy and human rights. It is sometimes said that states are too big for small things and too small for big things. However, if there are entities ready to take over smaller things, there is nothing yet available to resolve big issues. The rise of China and other Asian countries, where the role of the state has been instrumental in guaranteeing this rise, is a further evidence that it is too early to send the state into the dustbin of history, as Marxists dreamed of, or cut it down to the size of a mere “night watchman” as libertarians and neo-liberals would like.

The late British diplomat and scholar Adam Watson once observed: “Powers that find themselves able to lay down the law in a system in practice do so.”[23] This feature seems indeed to be one of the most constant imperatives of international relations that hasn’t depended on internal characteristics of a state but on its relative power. However, even this invariable is not immutable in its application. For the first time there is a global system and no single power is able to dominate the entire system. Attempts to do that lead to imperial overstretch and increasingly shorten a relative dominance. [①] W. Russell Mead, God and Gold. Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, Atlantic Books, 2007, p. 15.
[②] D. Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “The Myth of the Autocratic Revival. Why Liberal Democracy Will   Prevail,” Foreign Affairs, January-February 2009.
[③] S. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Verso, 2009, p. 88.
[④] K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Arc Manor, 2008, p.15.
[⑤] F. Fukuyama, “The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?” Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2012.
[⑥] J. Sachs, The Price of Civilization. Economics and Ethics after the Fall, The Bodley Head, 2011, p. 116.
[⑦] J. Dunn, Setting the People Free. The Story of Democracy, Atlantic Books, 2005, p. 127.
[⑧] H. Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin Books, 1965, p. 74.
[⑨] J. Sachs, The Price of Civilization: Economics and Ethics after the Fall, The Bodley Head, 2011, p. xi.
[⑩] A. Gat, “A Return of Authoritarian Great Powers,” Foreign Affairs, July/August, 2007, p. 60.
[11] K. Mahbubani, “The New Asian Hemisphere. The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East,” Public Affairs, 2008, p. 139.
[12] A. Gat, Op.cit., p. 74.
[13] S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of world Order, Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 178.
[14] S. Karaganov, “A Revolutionary Chaos of the New World,” Russia in Global Affairs, 28 December, 2011.
[15] C. Kupchan, “Diversity Wins,” Russia in Global Affairs, 29 December 2011, http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/number/Diversity-Wins-15426.
[16] F. Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Orde: from Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Profile Books, 2011, pp. 77-78.
[17] The International Herald Tribune, 20 January 2012.
[18] Ben Farmer, “Taliban intact and getting Pakistan backing, NATO report reveals,” The Telegraph, 1 February, 2012.
[19] A. Etzioni, Security First: for a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 86.
[20] T. L. Friedman, “The big question,” The International Herald Tribune, 4-5 March 2006, p. 6.
[21] D. Newsom ed., The Diplomacy of Human Rights, University Press of America, 1986, p. 80.
[22] A. Etzioni, From Empire to Community. A New Approach to International Relations, Palgrave, 2004, pp 14–15.
[23] A. Watson, The Evolution of International Society, Oxford: Routledge, 1992, p.291.

author： Rein Müllerson