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Description
Two parallel developments in world affairs that dominated the latter years of the twentieth century, each of which gained momentum with the disintegration of the Soviet Union a decade and a half ago, have continued into the new era. In politics, many of what had been one-party Communist states gave way to multiparty electoral democracies, in most cases with significantly expanded political rights and civil liberties for their citizens. Thirty years ago, only forty countries were politically 'free' by conventional Western standards; today there are ninety. (1) At the same time, what had been centrally planned and directed 'command' systems for organizing economic activity and distributing the resulting product made room for a sharply increased role for private initiative, including private ownership of assets and accumulation of wealth. While neither of these developments has been universal, traditional Communist societies committed to both one-party political systems and centrally planned economies have suddenly become a rare species, limited to isolated sightings like Cuba and North Korea.
Especially at the time of the Soviet collapse, many observers in the West simply assumed that the rejection of Communism reflected an eagerness to embrace both Western politics and Western economics. Russia and most of the other former Soviet republics quickly adopted many aspects of Western modes in both dimensions, as did the former Soviet dependencies in Eastern Europe. But it soon became apparent that imitation of Western ways was not the sole, nor always even the primary, motivation. On the positive side, the mere desire for independence, and on the negative, old-fashioned nationalism, turned out to be important drivers as well--sometimes, as in the former Yugoslavia, with disastrous consequences.
Moreover, Western-style economics and Western-style politics do not always go together. Russia, for example, has privatized large parts of what was once a tightly controlled economy steered by Gosplan under successive five-year plans adopted at the highest levels of the Soviet state. And since 1991 Russia has conducted several rounds of elections, for the national duma as well as for the president of the republic, that were substantially open and genuinely contested. But President Putin's government now seems to be cementing its grip on power in many forms, and prospects for the future of democracy in Russia remain uncertain--especially since Putin's reelection in 2004.
China presents an even larger question. Beginning with Deng Xiaoping's reforms in 1978, China has moved steadily away from central planning toward private economic initiative. Even within the economy's industrial sector, where state-owned enterprises were once dominant, the share of production still carried out under direct state ownership or control has shrunk to 42 percent. Most citizens are now free to decide where to work, whether to start a business, and whom to hire. Private wealth accumulation, including ownership of productive assets as well as residential real estate, is not just allowed but encouraged.
But at the national level the Chinese government remains a one-party dictatorship; and there is little publicly expressed interest in multiparty politics, broader freedom of expression, or other elements of Western-style democracy. Whether a country with one-fifth of the world's population and (soon) the world's second-largest economy can sustain the combination of market-oriented economics and nondemocratic politics is one of the most significant open questions in world affairs today.
Even within the Western world, however--where electoral democracy and a market-oriented economy are mostly taken for granted--parallel movement does not automatically imply a causal linkage. Do the two necessarily go together? And if so, what is the causal mechanism?
Half a century ago, the open question was whether central planning or a decentralized private market could better deliver efficient production of goods and services, investment in new capital resources, and gains over time in productivity and therefore, ultimately, in a population's standard of living. Richard Nixon's famous 'kitchen debate' with Nikita Khrushchev, in 1959, attracted so much interest at the time not just on account of the surrounding theatrics but because the question about which they were arguing was genuinely under dispute. Americans' memories of the 1930s were still strong; Soviet living standards were reportedly improving rapidly; and the Soviets had only recently demonstrated their scientific prowess by launching the Sputnik satellite into orbit around the Earth. Later, when Khrushchev said that the Soviet Union would 'bury' the United States, he was not threatening nuclear war (as many at the time misinterpreted him to imply) but predicting that the Soviets, with their superior economic system, would eventually overwhelm the West economically and therefore politically.
Khrushchev was wrong. And as more and more people living under Communism came to realize the error of that prediction, change ensued in fairly short order. Mao's China gave way to Deng's not as a matter of... |
More articles from Daedalus
Capitalism & democracy in 2040., June 22, 2007
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