That’s Chinaworld, Jake

Last night I went to a discussion on the future of globalisation featuring the BBC’s roving man in a white suit Humphrey Hawksley, Time reporter Alex Perry and French egghead Dominique Moïsi, as part of Glasgow’s cringe-inducing ‘Aye Write!’ book festival.  The debate has moved on a bit since those heady post-Berlin Wall days when excitable chaps like Thomas Friedman raved about being able to buy Big Macs that tasted exactly the same in Greenland as in Timbuktu, and when foolish futurologist Francis Fukuyama hailed “the end of history”.  History, of course, came back with a vengeance, and now all the talk is of the relative decline of the West and the return to the early modern period when Asian civilisations were globally dominant.  US-led globalisation in the noughties was a victim both of its own success (in lifting hundreds of millions of people in Asia out of poverty) and its failure (9/11, Iraq, climate change, credit crunch, etc).  If there is a defining feeling today, it is that we in Europe, and to a lesser extent America, are like those Mesoamerican tribes chasing each other through the jungle in rags in Mel Gibson’s hilarious romp Apocalypto, before stumbling onto the beach to the incredible sight of the massing Spanish galleons that would put their own squabbles into some perspective.  As you know, I’m firmly in this “we’re finished” camp.  No-one in India or China sits around writing ululating blogs like this.

Moïsi, halfway between Said and Huntington, argued for a new cultural understanding between West, East and Middle East, languidly positing that the great divisive forces today are emotional rather than economic.  Hawksley and Perry were more practical, arguing that the West’s imposition of instant democracy (or IMFocracy) has often been worse than useless and that many countries at the lower levels of development are better off with benevolent dictators: neo-Hobbesian princes like Paul Kagame and Lee Kuan Yew.  Certainly, Rwanda is joining Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore as countries who’ve developed impressively from war and poverty through enlightened despotism, with democracy an afterthought.  I asked the panel whether this argument might give a figleaf to regimes, like the al-Sauds and the Castros, who don’t want democracy because it’s a threat to their own power, rather than because it’s supposedly unsuitable for their stage of development.  Perry ummed and erred and admitted I’d hit the nail on the head; Hawksley didn’t even try to answer; Moïsi proffered a Gallic shrug from his ivory tower.  For every benevolent dictator there are a dozen malevolent ones; for every Kagame or Lee there are plenty of Mugabes, Amins and Kims Jong-il.

I haven’t been to Africa or to Taiwan or Korea, but I can certify that Singapore presents a huge challenge to anyone who instinctively believes in the moral and practical supremacy of liberal democracy.  Here is a country – or, rather, a city-state like old republican Venice – that had an African standard of living at the end of WWII and is today a beacon of trade and civilisation.  Yes, it helps that they are an entrepôt perfectly situated at one of the world’s prime crossroads for mercantile activity; yes, they have the advantage that any addition to their infrastructure, in such a small place, automatically benefits almost everyone, and unlike Londoners they don’t have to pay for the upkeep of a ruinous hinterland.  But look at their achievements, without democracy: the streets are spotless, transport and healthcare make ours seem even more embarrassing than they do anyway, the people are universally hard-working, well-educated, and don’t run around shooting, knifing and swearing at each other.  Under a soft, subtle authoritarianism they’ve willed not just the ends of a civilised society, but the means: they’ve won their wars on drugs and crime by caning criminals and killing drug dealers, and unlike Dubai there are very few signs of either extreme of selfish wealth or hopeless poverty.  They have a wonderful, vibrant melting pot, but without the bombs going off.  There are plenty of immigrants and a mix of cultures and languages, but all children wear uniforms, sing the national anthem and pledge allegiance to the country at school each morning.  We scoff at such things, fooling ourselves that we are more sophisticated, but look at the results.  Compare it to the mess our individualism has brought us to: yes, left and right, that means both of you.  As Hawksley pointed out, for the 99% of people who play by the rules, the system works.  The rest of the world should stand in awe of Singapore’s works.

Where does this leave China and India?  The panel pointed out that, beyond the glittering façades of Bangalore and Shanghai, both countries are hamstrung by some pretty epic social and environmental problems: the unreported Naxalite war in India (all the violence of Veerappan, not much of the Robin Hood charm), casino capitalism in Shenzhen, and massive corruption, inequality and gendercide in both countries.  Before democracy can take hold in China, the rule of law and property rights have to be established much more firmly.  This is the mistake we made in Iraq: to imagine that elections alone, in the absence of those criteria and of civil institutions like a free press, would transform a country buggered by dictatorship, war and anarchy into a functioning liberal democracy overnight.  In China, then, we should agitate not for the end of the party but for the end of its abuses.  But would India have been better off by beginning as a dictatorship than a democracy?  I doubt they could have arrived at a dictator as enlightened as Nehru – and, even now, the relative dispersal of power and information there gives them an advantage in solving their great problems that China lacks.

But Lee Kuan Yew is a hero in China.  If that country, on a huge scale, can replicate what he achieved on a small one – then the world will deservedly be theirs, and we will either go the way of the Mayan and the Inca, or, if we are lucky, end our days as tour guides in the museum of Europe.