Which Way Is History Marching?

Addressing the rise of China, Deudney and Ikenberry repeat the claim that nondemocratic regimes are necessarily ridden with corruption and cronyism, and so their development is bound to stall once they reach a certain level of growth. But as former U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan has noted, Singapore -- a nondemocratic state with a first-class economy -- is one of the least corrupt states in the world. The same was true of imperial Germany and its Prussian predecessor. It has become an axiom that corruption is inevitable in the absence of democratic transparency and accountability. Yet Prussian-German bureaucracy was renowned for its efficiency and clean hands and was put forward as an ideal type by Max Weber. The secret of these model cases lies in the bureaucracy's high social status, strong ethics of duty and public service, and, in Singapore, high pay. China today suffers from pervasive corruption, and it remains to be seen whether its neo-Mandarin rulers can eventually succeed in establishing similar standards.

It is widely argued that the rule of law is essential for an advanced capitalist economy to function and that nondemocratic countries lacking it are at a disadvantage. This argument ignores the fact that Germany was semiauthoritarian until 1918 and yet the rule of law prevailed and a first-class capitalist economy flourished. The same was true of Japan before 1945 and is true of Singapore today.

Although the pure economic argument turns out to be less clear-cut than many believe, proponents of democratic inevitability still contend that sociopolitical transformation generated by economic development eventually leads to democratization. It is widely believed that economic and social development create pressures for democratization that authoritarian state structures cannot contain. Michael Mandelbaum, for example, argues in his book Democracy's Good Name that capitalism is synonymous with individual choice. People who are accustomed to exercising free choice in their personal lives can be expected to demand the same right in the political sphere. Thus, nondemocratic capitalist regimes suffer from an internal contradiction that makes them prone to implosion.

This argument appears very convincing until one remembers that the world is full of contradictions and tensions that do not necessarily lead to implosion. Market democracies themselves have always been plagued by the contradiction between the great economic inequality generated by capitalism (which also biases the democratic political process) and democracy's egalitarian drive. This tension was so stark that socialists throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century regarded it as an irreconcilable contradiction certain to doom capitalist democracy, leading them to argue that socialism -- economic democratization -- was the inevitable wave of the future. In the meantime, some of this inherent tension has been alleviated by the welfare state in the democratic capitalist countries, although it always remains very close to the surface, occasionally bursting out in anticapitalist demonstrations and other forms of protest.

VALUE CHAINS

In their article "How Development Leads to Democracy," Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel offer a value-centered version of modernization theory, based on their important comprehensive surveys of world values. They document clear differences between low- and high-income societies due to shifts from the "survival values" of traditional societies to the individualistic "self-expression values" of more affluent societies. Based on the experience of the twentieth century, Inglehart and Welzel argue that such a transformation of values lays the groundwork for democratization. But like other varieties of modernization theory, their argument overlooks the more fundamental question: Are liberal values an inevitable, universal product of industrialization and greater affluence, or has this particular set of values itself been decisively shaped by the overwhelming political, economic, and cultural liberal hegemony that the United States and western Europe have exercised since the defeat of the nondemocratic capitalist great powers in the first half of the twentieth century?

Inglehart and Welzel stress the persistence of different cultural traditions and significant cultural variations even among societies that have undergone modernization. Indeed, in East Asia, the world's most populous and fastest-developing region, long-standing cultural traditions emphasize community, social order, and social harmony -- but they do not impede growth. Whether an alternative path to modernity will emerge there and prove viable remains to be seen.

Inglehart and Welzel are careful to note that the democratization process is not deterministic but probabilistic. Nevertheless, they leave the strong impression that all that is necessary for it to take its course is time. Undeniably, there is a strong propensity for industrial capitalist society and liberal democracy to be associated with each other, and this propensity is largely responsible for the spread and success of the liberal democratic model over the past two centuries. Even a strong propensity, however, is just that; whether it triumphs over competing propensities depends on circumstances, countervailing forces, contingent events, and other imponderables.

UNDILUTED OPTIMISM

When it comes to the question of how to deal with a nondemocratic superpower China in the international arena, Deudney and Ikenberry, as well as Inglehart and Welzel, exhibit undiluted liberal internationalist optimism.