Which Way Is History Marching?

DEMOCRACY'S VICTORY IS NOT PREORDAINED
Azar Gat

Two recent articles in these pages -- "The Myth of the Autocratic Revival" (January/February 2009) and "How Development Leads to Democracy" (March/April 2009) -- have taken issue with my July/August 2007 essay, "The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers." In the first, Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry dispute my argument that the authoritarian capitalist great powers Germany and Japan were defeated in both world wars largely because of contingent factors rather than structural inefficiencies. As I have argued, these countries were too small in comparison to the United States. With respect to the challenge posed by China and Russia, Deudney and Ikenberry insist that developed nondemocratic capitalist societies will not be viable in the long run.

They restate modernization theory -- most recently amplified by the political scientists Francis Fukuyama and Michael Mandelbaum -- according to which there is only one sustainable route to modernity: the liberal democratic path. Seen in this light, those countries unfortunate enough to have strayed from the path originally taken by the United Kingdom and the United States eventually must converge on the road to liberalism, either because they are inferior to democracies in terms of power or because their intractable internal contradictions will eventually usher in democratic transformation. Liberal democracy is presumed to possess intrinsic advantages, a presumption that confers an air of inevitability on the past as well as on the future. If "world history is the world's court," as Hegel put it, then history's verdict is clear. But is it really? Or might the owl of Minerva, due to its current flight path, be encountering optical illusions?

SIZE MATTERS

Deudney and Ikenberry believe -- like Hegel -- that accidents happen to those who are accident-prone. They insist that Germany and Japan were defeated in World War II due to their deep-seated structural problems. It is true that Germany suffered from a critical production failure in 1940-42, but this was remedied from 1942 on. In World War I, it had experienced no similar failure. Nor did Japan's industrial war machine suffer extraordinary failure in World War II. In both world wars, the nondemocratic capitalist great powers performed great feats and initially won shattering victories. On the other side, the democracies repeatedly blundered: they were dangerously late in rising to the challenge; their armed forces, particularly during the 1930s, were ill prepared; their initial defeats were potentially catastrophic; and their conduct thereafter was not free of serious errors.

Contrary to the comforting notion that the democratic system eventually proved superior, the reason for Germany's and Japan's defeats lies in the fact that the two countries were simply smaller than their adversaries and less tolerant of failure. For Germany to have broken out of its limited territorial confines and fatally crippled the superior coalition assembled against it in either of the world wars, it would have needed a consecutive string of major successes. Indeed, it came remarkably close to achieving that goal in both world wars. By contrast, the colossal power of the United States meant that the democracies were able to sustain catastrophic failures -- such as the loss of Russia as an ally in World War I and the fall of France and the destruction of the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in World War II -- and still recover.

Thus, without the United States as their ally, France and the United Kingdom would probably have lost to Germany in both world wars. The remainder of the twentieth century would have been very different, and political scientists would have had a far less rosy story to tell about democracy. The constructed grand narrative of the twentieth century would have emphasized the superior cohesiveness of authoritarian regimes, not the triumph of freedom. For grand narratives, like history, are written by the victors.

Reading Deudney and Ikenberry, it seems that the victory of liberal democracy was virtually inevitable. But in order to make this claim, one must assume that the rise of a huge liberal democratic United States as the paramount political power of the twentieth century was preordained -- and that it could only have emerged and evolved in the form that it did (founded on a vast and sparsely populated continent by Englishmen who subsequently achieved independence and unity and then retained this unity after a civil war). Moreover, one would have to assume that there was no way Germany could have won either of the world wars in Europe and that if it had, a victorious Reich (and a victorious imperial Japan) would have inevitably liberalized in due course. None of these assumptions is plausible.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Since 1945, nondemocratic capitalist great powers have been absent from the international system, but the recent meteoric rise of China has broken that pattern. Unlike Germany and Japan in the past, China today has the world's largest population, and it is experiencing such spectacular economic growth that it is projected to close the economic gap with the developed world within a generation or two.