Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Charles A. Kupchan
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2012
A crisis of governability has engulfed the worlds most advanced democracies. It is no accident that the United States, Europe, and Japan are simultaneously experiencing political breakdown; globalization is producing a widening gap between what electorates are asking of their governments and what those governments are able to deliver. The mismatch between the growing demand for good governance and its shrinking supply is one of the gravest challenges facing the Western world today. Voters in industrialized democracies are looking to their governments to respond to the decline in living standards and the growing inequality resulting from unprecedented global flows of goods, services, and capital. They also expect their representatives to deal with surging immigration, global warming, and other knock-on effects of a globalized world. But Western governments are not up to the task. Globalization is making less effective the policy levers at their disposal while also diminishing the Wests traditional sway over world affairs by fueling the rise of the rest. The inability of democratic governments to address the needs of
Charles A. Kupchan is Professor of International Aairs at Georgetown University and Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book No Ones World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (Oxford University Press, 2012).
de e r i n t h e h e a dl ig h t s
Globalization has expanded aggregate wealth and enabled developing countries to achieve unprecedented prosperity. The proliferation of investment, trade, and communication networks has deepened interdependence and its potentially pacifying effects and has helped pry open nondemocratic states and foster popular uprisings. But at the same time, globalization and the digital economy on which it depends are the main source of the Wests current crisis of governability. Deindustrialization and outsourcing,
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on e p r ob l e m , t h r e e f l avor s
In the United States, partisan confrontation is paralyzing the political system. The underlying cause is the poor state of the U.S. economy. Since 2008, many Americans have lost their houses, jobs, and retirement savings. And these setbacks come on the heels of back-to-back decades of stagnation in middle-class wages. Over the past ten years, the average household income in the United States has fallen by over ten percent. In the meantime, income inequality has been steadily rising, making the United States the most unequal country in the industrialized world. The primary source of the declining fortunes of the American worker is global competition; jobs have been heading overseas. In addition, many of the most competitive companies in the digital economy do not have long coattails. Facebooks estimated value is around $70 billion, and it employs roughly 2,000 workers; compare this with General Motors, which is valued at $35 billion and has 77,000 employees in the United States and 208,000 worldwide. The wealth of the United States cutting-edge companies is not trickling down to the middle class. These harsh economic realities are helping revive ideological and partisan cleavages long muted by the nations rising economic fortunes. During the decades after World War II, a broadly shared prosperity pulled Democrats and Republicans toward the political center. But today, Capitol Hill is largely devoid of both centrists and bipartisanship; Democrats campaign for more stimulus, relief for the unemployed, and taxes on the rich, whereas Republicans clamor for radical cuts in the size and cost of government. Expediting the hollowing out of the center are partisan redistricting, a media environment that provokes more than it informs, and a broken campaign finance system that has been captured by special interests.
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b i t t e r m e dic i n e
It is not by chance that the Wests crisis of governability coincides with new political strength among rising powers; economic and political vigor is passing from the core to the periphery of the international system. And while the worlds most open states are experiencing a loss of control as they integrate into a globalized world, illiberal states, such as China, are deliberately keeping a much tighter grip on their societies through centralized decisionmaking, censorship of the media, and state-supervised markets. If
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Shlomo Avineri
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2012
Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe. by jan-werner mller . Yale University Press, 2011, 304 pp. $45.00. How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism. by eric hobsbawm . Yale University Press, 2011, 480 pp. $35.00.
Any intelligent observer of Europe in the 1930s would have been hard-pressed not to feel that its future belonged to either communism or fascism. Liberal democracy, besieged on the left by Stalins Soviet Union and on the right by Hitlers Germany and Mussolinis Italy, seemed to stand no chance of survival. Most central and eastern European countries had already succumbed to authoritarianism or different variations of fascism, and the Great Depression suggested that the activist solutions implemented by both extremes were better than the feeble nostrums liberalism could offer. Back then, the notion that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europe would be democratic from the Tagus and the Ebro to the Danube and the Vistula would have seemed utterly ridiculous.
Shlomo Avineri is Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of, among other books, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. He served as Director General of Israels Foreign Ministry in the first cabinet of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
t h e bat t l e f or e u r op e
Mllers book is at once a political history of Europe since World War I, an inquiry into why Europe failed to achieve consolidated liberal democracies between the two wars yet was able to do so after 1945, and a collection of essays on some important European political thinkers. Although the volumes chapters show signs of their origin as separate articles, its overall message, complex and sometimes highly original, is clear. In a nutshell, post-1945 democratic development in Western Europe was not achieved easily, nor was it just the reestablishment of the previous political order. It grew out of the lessons learned from the brittleness of interwar democracy and the legacies of some of the nondemocratic interwar movements. It was helped, moreover, by the urgency and cohesion supplied by the broader Cold War environment. As Mller tells it, the weakness of the post-1918 European democratic regimes derived primarily from the reordering caused by World War I. By suddenly bringing about the collapse of four empires (the Hapsburg, the German, the Russian, and the Ottoman), most of which were multiethnic, the conflict tore down a well-established conservative and hierarchical order and replaced it with a series of weak republican regimes. Many of these regimes were based on the principle of national self-determination, but at
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m a rx i s m s t u r n
One of the most surprising twists in Europes political evolution is the reversal of fortunes that has befallen Marxism, a school of thought that once seemed a formidable ideological contender. Hobsbawms latest book, How to Change the World, chronicles its influence over the twentieth century and tries to make a case for its contemporary relevance. Hobsbawm is one of the giants of the historical profession and the author of an impressive list of magisterial studies. Even those who disagree with his Marxist outlook know that his sophisticated use of Marxist theory has greatly enriched the study of industrialization, the modern working class, various revolutionary movements, and the emergence of empire.
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