Why the 'China Model' Isn't Going Away
Joshua Kurlantzick
The Atlantic
Mar 21, 2013
From Bangkok to Caracas, Beijing's style of authoritarian capitalism is gaining influence.
Once considered an awkward, unsustainable blend of authoritarian politics and capitalist
economics, China's growth "model" has shown impressive resilience in recent years. In this
excerpt from his new book Democracy in Retreat, Joshua Kurlantzick explores why the "Beijing
Consensus" has attracted so many admirers in recent years.
The attendees of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos are not exactly used to being told
what to do. The Swiss resort draws the global elite: the highest-powered investment bankers, the
top government officials and leaders, the biggest philanthropists, and the most famous
celebrities, who gather each year to solve the world's most pressing problems and still have time
for evening cocktails.
But in January 2009, the Davos crowd had to listen to a blistering lecture from a most unlikely
source. The first senior Chinese leader to attend the World Economic Forum, premier Wen
Jiabao, some thought, might take a low-key approach to his speech to the Forum. But at Davos,
that genial grandpa was not in evidence. Months after Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering the
global economic crisis, Wen told the Davos attendees that the West was squarely to blame for
the meltdown roiling the entire world. An "excessive expansion of financial institutions in blind
pursuit of profit," a failure of government supervision of the financial sector, and an
"unsustainable model of development, characterized by prolonged low savings and high
consumption" caused the crisis, said an angry Wen.
Five years earlier, such a broadside from a Chinese leader would have been unthinkable. Though
in the 1990s and early 2000s China had used its soft power to reassure its Asian neighbors and
expand its influence in regions like Africa and Latin America, until the end of 2008 nearly every
top Chinese official still lived by Deng Xiaoping's old advice to build China's strength while
maintaining a low profile in international affairs. But in 2008 and 2009 the global economic
crisis decimated the economies of nearly every leading democracy, while China surfed through
the downturn virtually unscathed, though Beijing did implement its own large stimulus package,
worth roughly $600 billion. China's economy grew by nearly 9 percent in 2009, while Japan's
shrunk by over 5 percent, and the American economy contracted by 2.6 percent. By August
2010, China (not including Hong Kong) held over $860 billion in U.S. treasuries; when Chinese
leaders returned to Davos the year after Wen's scolding of the West, they came not to chat but to
hunt for distressed Western assets they could buy up on the cheap. In the downturn's wake, the
crisis made many Western leaders tentative, questioning whether not only their own economies
but also their political systems actually contained deep, possibly unfixable flaws. The economic
crisis, said former U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, has left "the American model
... under a cloud."
These flaws appeared especially notable when compared with what seemed like the streamlined,
rapid decision-making of the Chinese leadership, which did not have to deal with such
"obstacles" as a legislature or judiciary or free media that actually could question or block its
actions. "One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably
enlightened group of people, as in China today, it can also have great advantages," wrote the
influential New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman. "One party can just
impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society
forward." Even John Williamson, the economist who originally coined the term "Washington
Consensus," admitted, in an essay in 2012, that the Beijing Consensus appeared to be gaining
ground rapidly, at the expense of the Washington Consensus.
As Western leaders, policy-makers, and journalists questioned whether their own systems had
failed, Chinese leaders began to more explicitly promote their authoritarian capitalist model of
development. After all, in the wake of the crisis many Western governments, including France
and the United States, bailed out their financial sectors and many of their leading companies.
These bailouts made it harder for Western leaders to criticize Beijing's economic interventions.
In Beijing, a raft of new books came out promoting the China model of development and
blasting the failures of Western liberal capitalism. "It is very possible that the Beijing Consensus
can replace the Washington Consensus," Cui Zhiyuan, a professor at Tsinghua University in
Beijing, told the International Herald Tribune in early 2010. Suddenly, too, the same Chinese
leaders who in the early and mid-2000s still had played the role of the meek learner became, in
speeches and public appearances and writings, very much the triumphalist teacher. In one article
in the China Daily, one think-tank expert from China's Commerce Ministry wrote, "The U.S.' top
financial officials need to shift their people's attention from the country's struggling economy to
cover up their incompetence and blame China for everything that is going wrong in their
country."
In previous reverse waves, eras when global democratic gains stalled and went backwards, there
was no alternate example of development anywhere near as successful as China today; the Soviet
Union claimed to be an alternate example, but it never produced anywhere near the sustained
growth rates and successful, globally competitive companies of China today. In the early 1960s,
another time of a reverse wave following the post-WWII democratization in Europe and parts of
Asia, the only real challenger to liberal, capitalist democracy was the communist bloc.
Today, China -- and to a lesser extent other successful authoritarian capitalists -- offer a viable
alternative to the leading democracies. In many ways, their systems pose the most serious
challenge to democratic capitalism since the rise of communism and fascism in the 1920s and
early 1930s. And in the wake of the global economic crisis, and the dissatisfaction with
democracy in many developing nations, leaders in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are studying
the Chinese model far more closely -- a model that, eventually, will help undermine democracy
in their countries.
In recent years, the "China model" has become shorthand for economic liberalization without
political liberalization. But China's model of development is actually more complex. It builds on
earlier, state-centered Asian models of development such as in South Korea and Taiwan, while
taking uniquely Chinese steps designed to ensure that the Communist Party remains central to
economic and political policy-making. Like previous Asian modernizers, China in its reform era
has devoted significant resources to primary education, resulting in youth literacy rates of nearly
98 percent; in many other developing nations, the youth literacy rate is less than 70 percent. Like
other high-growth Asian economies, China also has created highly favorable environments for
foreign investment. Yet in the China model, the Beijing government maintains a high degree of
control over the economy, but it is hardly returning to socialism. Instead, Beijing has developed a
hybrid form of capitalism in which it has opened its economy to some extent, but it also ensures
the government controls strategic industries, picks corporate winners, determines investments by
state funds, and pushes the banking sector to support national champion firms. Indeed, though in
the 1980s and 1990s China privatized many state firms, the central government still controls
roughly 120 companies. Among these are the biggest and most powerful corporations in China:
of the 42 biggest companies in China, only 3 are privately-owned. In the 39 economic sectors
considered most important by the government, state firms control roughly 85 percent of all
assets, according to a study by China economist Carl Walter. In China the Party appoints senior
directors of many of the largest companies, who are expected to become Party members, if they
are not already. Working through these networks, the Beijing leadership sets state priorities,
gives signals to companies, and determines corporate agendas, but does so without the direct
hand of the state appearing in public.
What's more, in this type of authoritarian capitalism, government intervention in business is
utilized, in a way not possible in a free-market democracy, to strengthen the power of the ruling
regime and China's position internationally. When Beijing wants to increase investments in
strategically important nations, such as Thailand or South Africa, it can put pressure on China's
major banks, all of which are linked to the state, to boost lending to Chinese companies operating
in those nations. For example, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which is attempting to
compete with multinationals like Siemens, received some $30 billion in credit from statecontrolled China Development Bank, on terms its foreign competitors would have salivated over.
By contrast, though the Obama administration wanted to drastically upgrade the United States'
relationship with Indonesia, an important strategic partner, it could not convince many American
companies to invest there, and, unlike the Chinese leadership, it could not force them to do so.
In short, the China model sees commerce as a means to promote national interests, and not just to
empower (and potentially to make wealthy) individuals. And for over three decades, China's
model of development has delivered staggering successes. Since the beginning of China's reform
and opening in the late 1970s, the country has gone from a poor, mostly agrarian nation to, in
2010, the second-largest economy in the world. With the economies of leading industrialized
democracies still suffering, today China, and to a lesser extent India, are providing virtually the
only growth in the whole global economy.
Since 2008, not only top Chinese leaders but also people across the country clearly have become
more confident about Beijing's place in the world. Some of this confidence is only natural, part
of China reclaiming its position as a major world power. But some of the confidence comes from
China's more recent rise during the global economic crisis, which put Beijing in an international
leadership role far before its leaders expected. And, some of the confidence comes from Chinese
leaders, diplomats, and scholars traveling more widely, and realizing that their democratic
neighbors -- Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and many others that used to lecture China
about human rights and freedoms -- actually are falling behind China's breakneck growth.
"Chinese leaders used to come here and want to learn from us," one senior Thai official said.
"Now it's like they don't have anything left to learn ... They have no interest in listening to us."
China's newfound confidence has manifested itself in many forms. When the Nobel committee
awarded the 2010 Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, jailed in China for organizing an
online petition calling for the rule of law, Beijing condemned Norway and other European
nations, and applied intense pressure on European officials, and many from Asian nations as well
not to attend the ceremony awarding his prize. Ultimately, several of the nations China pressured
the hardest, like the Philippines, declined to send representatives to the Nobel ceremony.
A few months earlier, Beijing had applied similar pressure on European nations, this time to join
with it in an unprecedented public call to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency. China
followed up on its call by helping Chinese firms, and foreign companies, begin using the
renminbi more readily in international transactions, as well as in funds based in Hong Kong.
When, in the fall of 2011, European nations looked for saviors to their growing economic crisis,
China stepped in. Chinese officials signaled their willingness to contribute as much as 100
billion euros to the European Financial Stability Fund, or possibly a new bailout mechanism set
up by the International Monetary Fund. In Greece, China launched plans to invest billions in
infrastructure, including its ports, while also repeatedly offering to buy up Greek debt.
Beijing has become more forceful in dealing with Washington, too, a forcefulness that can add to
its appeal with developing countries, who've often looked for another major power, and
particularly a power hailing from Asia, to balance their relations with the United States. When
the Obama White House informed Chinese officials in the summer of 2009 that it, like every
other recent American administration, planned to host the Dalai Lama for a private meeting,
Beijing aggressively lobbied the White House not to meet the Tibetan leader. The White House
acquiesced, and for the first time since the administration of George H.W. Bush, the Dalai Lama
came to America without meeting the president, a huge victory for China. "There has been a
change in China's attitude," Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a former senior National Security Council
official focusing on China, told the Washington Post. "The Chinese find with startling speed that
people have come to view them as a major global player. And that has fed a sense of
confidence." Or as one current senior American official who deals with China said, "They are
powerful, and now they're finally acting like it."
In 2010 and 2011 and 2012, China also surprised its neighbors by stepping up its demands for
large swaths of the South China Sea, other contested waters, and regions along its disputed land
borders. In the summer and fall of 2010, China reacted so furiously to Japan's decision to
impound a Chinese fishing boat in disputed waters that it cut off shipments to Tokyo of rare
earth materials, critical to modern electronics like cellular phones and fiber optics. Beijing also
later clashed again with Japan over disputed islands and has warned its neighbor Vietnam not to
work with Western oil companies like ExxonMobil on joint explorations of potential oil and gas
in the South China Sea. It has detained Philippine and Vietnamese boats, and claimed nearly the
entire sea -- Beijing's claims extended nearly to the shores of the Philippines, hundreds of miles
from China's territory.
This increasingly assertive Chinese diplomacy has alienated some other countries, particularly in
Asia. Yet along with more forceful diplomacy, Beijing has started to proactively promote its
model of development, and in some ways, its newfound confidence only adds to its global
appeal, since other, smaller countries want to join forces with a clearly rising power. But even as
China has become more confident, its leadership still recognizes that it cannot challenge
American military power, at least not anytime soon. Despite boosting its defense budget by over
10 percent annually, China remains a long way from developing a global blue water navy, or
expeditionary forces capable of fighting far from China's borders. Most years, the Pentagon's
budget surpasses the defense budgets of all other major military powers combined. "We need to
think more on how to preserve national integrity. We have no intention of challenging the US
[militarily,]" admitted Major General Luo Yan, a senior member of the People's Liberation
Army.
Recognizing that China remains decades from challenging the Pentagon, Beijing's leaders realize
they can compete in other ways, such as by promoting their development model, and as other
countries learn and adopt aspects of the China model, they will become more likely to align with
China, to share China's values, and to connect with China's leaders. The economic crisis, Chinese
economist Cheng Enfu told reporters, "displays the advantages of the Chinese model ... Some
mainstream [Chinese] economists are saying that India should learn from China; Latin American
countries are trying to learn from China. When foreign countries send delegations to China, they
show interest in the Chinese way of developing."
By the early 2000s, China already had developed training programs for foreign officials, usually
from developing nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia. These officials came to
China for courses in economic management, policing, and judicial practice, among other areas.
At the time, Chinese officials would not necessarily suggest China had an economic model to
impart. But by the late 2000s, many of these courses explicitly focused on elements of the China
model, from the way Beijing uses its power to allocate loans and grants to certain companies, to
China's strategies for co-opting entrepreneurs into the Communist Party, to China's use of special
economic zones to attract foreign investment over the past thirty years. One Vietnamese official
who repeatedly has traveled to China for such programs noted how the style of the programs has
changed over time. Now, he said, Chinese officials, far more confident than even ten years ago,
would introduce the example of one or another Chinese city that had successfully attracted
sizable investments, talking through how the city government coordinates all permits and other
needs, and moves favored projects swiftly through any approval process. Central Asian attendees
at Chinese training sessions noted how they increasingly learned about the Chinese judicial
system, in which the Party has almost complete control, and then returned to their home
countries, where their governments used similar types of control measures over their judiciaries.
Beijing also has built close political party-to-political party ties with several other developing
nations. Increasingly, it has utilized these ties to promote its model of political and economic
development. For at least two decades, Vietnamese officials have traveled to China, and have
based many of Vietnam's development policies on China's strategies. More recently, Chinese
officials have worked on development planning with leading politicians in neighboring
Mongolia, which democratized after 1989 but where the public has become increasingly
disenchanted with corruption and weak growth. Chinese officials also have co-operated with
United Russia, the main pro-Kremlin party, whose leaders want to study how China has opened
its economy without giving up political control. In 2009, United Russia held a special meeting
with top Chinese leaders to learn Beijing's strategy of development and political power.
These efforts to promote a China model of undemocratic development build on a decade-long
effort by Beijing to amass soft power in the developing world. Among other efforts, this strategy
has included expanding the international reach of Chinese media, such as by launching new
China-funded supplements in newspapers in many different countries, and by vastly expanding
the reach and professionalism of Chinese newswire Xinhua. Today, according to its own figures,
China's state-backed international television channel reaches over sixty-five million viewers
outside the country. This strategy also includes broadening the appeal of Chinese culture by
opening Confucius Institutes -- programs on Chinese language and culture, at universities from
Uzbekistan to Tanzania. It has involved a rapid and substantial expansion of China's foreign aid
programs, so that Beijing is now the largest donor to many neighboring nations like Cambodia,
Burma, and Laos. An analysis of China's overseas lending, compiled by the Financial Times in
2010, found that China lent more money to developing nations in 2009 and 2010 than the World
Bank had, a stark display of Beijing's growing foreign assistance. And the soft power initiative
has also included outreach to foreign students, providing scholarships, work-study programs and
other incentives to young men and women from developing countries. The number of foreign
students studying in China grew from roughly 52,000 in 2000 to 240,000 in 2009.
Over the past decade, too, China has set up networks of formal and informal summits with other
developing nations. At first, the summits offered China the opportunity to emphasize its role as a
potential strategic partner and source of investment and trade. But over the past five years some
summits, like those with Southeast Asian and African leaders, also subtly advertised China's
model of development, according to numerous participants. Several Thai politicians who
attended the Boao Forum for Asia, a kind of China-centered version of the World Economic
Forum in Davos, noted that, in recent years, some of the discussions at Boao had shifted from a
kind of general talk of globalization and its impact in Asia to more specific conversations about
some of the failings of Western economic models exposed by the global economic crisis, and
whether China's type of development might be less prone to such risks.
The soft power initiative also has involved a coordinated effort to upgrade the quality of China's
diplomatic corps, replacing an older generation of media-shy, stiff bureaucrats with a younger
group of Chinese men and women, many of whom are fluent in English and comfortable
bantering with local journalists. One day, while working in Thailand, reporters saw the then-U.S.
ambassador Ralph Boyce, appearing on a prominent Thai talk show. Boyce was known in the
diplomatic community for his knowledge of Thailand and command of Thai; on the show, he
spoke fluently and elegantly. Alongside him, the Chinese ambassador to Thailand also appeared,
speaking fluent Thai and appearing right at home in the freewheeling television talk format. In
one cable released by Wikileaks, even American diplomats stationed in Thailand admitted that
Thai officials had become increasingly admiring of China and its model of development, and less
interested in the American model.
Until the past two or three years, the China model appealed mostly to the world's most repressive
autocrats, eager to learn how China has modernized its authoritarianism. But in recent years it is
not just autocrats who have been learning from Beijing. China's soft power offensive has given it
increasing leverage over democracies in the developing world, and made Beijing's model of
development more attractive to leaders even in freer nations, places where there has already been
some degree of democratic transition.
Since China's advocacy of its model of development is still relatively new, it will take years to
see the full effect of its challenge to Western liberal orthodoxy. Still, one can see some initial
effects in developing democracies. In Venezuela and Nicaragua, Beijing has ingratiated itself
with the leadership, offering $20 billion in loans to Caracas in the spring of 2010, a time of
economic downturn in Venezuela; China's loans helped Hugo Chavez perpetuate his
government, even in the face of significant opposition. As China has gained a larger presence in
nations like Venezuela, Chavez increasingly sent top diplomats and bureaucrats to Beijing to
specifically examine China's strategies of development, and how they might be applied in
Central or South America.
Similar shifts have taken place in Southeast Asia, where China's soft power, and its economic
strength, has broadened its appeal, even when its military aggressiveness sometimes have hurt it
at the same time. What's more, China has used its influence to push Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam ,
and Thailand to deport Uighurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and other political migrants fleeing
China, as it has used its growing power in Nepal to push the Nepalese government to run back
Tibetans fleeing China, even though Nepal has for years provided shelter to many Tibetans. And
in Central Asia, where China increasingly conducts training seminars for local police, judges,
and other justice officials, Central Asian officials say that Beijing has pushed them to use their
judicial systems to arrest and deport Uighurs as well.
Across Southeast Asia, in fact, China's model has gained considerable acclaim. "There are, of
course, no official statements from [Southeast Asian] countries about their decisions to follow
the Beijing Consensus or not," writes prominent Indonesian scholar Ignatius Wibowo. "The
attraction to the Chinese model is unconscious."
Still, it is possible to quantify this "unconscious" appeal. Having analyzed surveys of political
values in Southeast Asia going back a decade, Wibowo concludes that people in many Southeast
Asian share a willingness to abandon some of their democratic values for higher growth, and the
kind of increasingly state-directed economic system that many of these countries had, in their
authoritarian days, and that China still has today. Southeast Asian nations "have shifted their
development strategy from one based on free markets and democracy to one based on semi-free
markets and an illiberal political system," Wibowo writes. "The 'Beijing Consensus' clearly has
gained ground in Southeast Asia." Indeed, by examining the political trajectory of the ten states
that belong to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, going back more than a decade,
Wibowo found that with only a few exceptions, each country's political model, examined
through a series of political indicators, has moved in the direction of China and away from
liberal democracy over the past decade, largely because these nations had watched China's
successes, and contrasted it with the West's failures. Many Southeast Asian leaders and top
officials were implementing strategies of development modeled on China's, including taking
back state control of strategic industries, recentralizing political decision-making, and using the
judicial system as, increasingly, a tool of state power, and re-establishing one-party rule -- all
changes that undermine democratic development. Supporting his claims, the most recent
Economist Intelligence Unit's survey of global democracy, which analyzes nearly every nation in
the world, found that the global financial and economic crisis "has increased the attractiveness of
the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism for some emerging markets" -- which has added to
democracy's setbacks.
In Thailand, for example, growing numbers of politicians, bureaucrats, and even journalists
favorably contrasting China's undemocratic model of government decision-making with
Thailand's messy, and sometimes-violent pseudo-democracy. In the past five years, as Thailand's
urban-based middle-class, and its favored political parties, have taken back dominance of
politics, they have increasingly adopted tools of control similar to China. These have included
creating an Internet monitoring and blocking system like China's and skewing the judiciary,
through judicial appointments and "instructions" to judges from the royal palace, so that judicial
rulings weaken potential opposition parties and ensure the dominance of the ruling party.
Although not every element of Thailand's political change was explicitly modeled on China, of
course, many Thai officials noted how the use of the judiciary, the control of the Internet, and
other political tools did have some inspiration from China.
Even outside Southeast Asia, in other parts of Asia, China's gravitational pull and its soft power
have had an influence on democracies. Overall, concluded political scientist Yun-han Chu, who
studied Asian Barometer surveys about East Asians' commitment to democracy,
"authoritarianism remains a fierce competitor of democracy in East Asia," in no small part
because of the influence of China's ability to foster economic success without real political
change, providing an alternative model that is clearly visible to other East Asians, who travel to
China, work with Chinese companies, buy Chinese products, and host Chinese officials. As he
notes, China will, in the coming years, become the center of East Asian trade and economic
integration, giving it even more power. "Newly democratized [Asian] countries [will]
increasingly become economically integrated with and dependent on non-democratic countries,"
Chu writes.
To be sure, China's model of development, just like democratic capitalism, suffers from
numerous flaws. These flaws potentially include an inability to hold corrupt or foolish leaders to
account, a lack of checks on state power, and a reliance on benign and wise autocrats for the
China model to work, which is hardly a given -- for every Deng Xiaoping, the politically savvy
and foresighted architect of China's economic reforms, one could find ten Mobutu Sese Sekos or
Kim Jong Ils. Rising inequality within China, between the favored urban areas and the less welloff interior rural provinces, also threatens to unhinge China's economic miracle, either through
growing waves of protests by rural dwellers or massive popular migrations that unleash
instability. Already, China has shifted from one of the most equal -- if poor -- nations in Asia in
the late 1970s to one of the most unequal societies, today, in East Asia. But for now, China has
seen relative success in its attempt to quietly impart its model of development to other nations.
The growing appeal of China's model of authoritarian
capitalism, and how it threatens the West
Niv Horesh
South China Morning Post
Published: Sunday, 19 July 2015
Updated: Tuesday, 15 November 2016
Under President Xi Jinping, China is succeeding in creating an alternative vision for global
leadership designed to challenge Western, and in particular American, dominance. Momentum is
gathering behind the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a US$100 billion initiative officially
launched by China last month, in the face of US opposition, to finance Asia's infrastructure
needs. It is the first time the US is without a role in what will be a leading financial institution in
the world.
The rise of the AIIB comes months after the British government became the first in the Western
world to issue a sovereign bond in renminbi, reigniting the debate over whether the renminbi can
eventually supplant the US dollar as the leading global reserve currency. And the extent of
China's programme to build artificial islands in disputed waters in the South China Sea has been
revealed; the latest in a long series of assertive Chinese moves to counteract US influence in the
region.
Meanwhile, China's economic rise is seen as incrementally undermining US global leadership.
The message from China is clear: it is supremely confident in its own governance model and is
committed to pursuing an alternative path of development to Western-led neo-liberalism.
Until now, the Chinese brand of authoritarian capitalism has remained largely unpersuasive to
the majority, although it has gained traction in developing economies like Vietnam and
Venezuela. But the West needs to recognise the growing appeal of the China model in the eyes
of the developing world, especially as Western economies struggle to recover from the global
financial crisis.
When developing countries look to the West, they see growing disillusionment among its
electorates, austerity and rising inequality. The West's uncertainty about its own future serves to
magnify, even glorify, the Chinese success story for developing economies in Asia, Africa and
Latin America. It will not come as a surprise if more turn to China for lessons in economic
development.
The West has been painfully slow to react. Instead of using the financial crisis as an opportunity
for reflection, and to identify those elements of its economic system that simply are not working,
leading Western economies continue to promote neo-liberalism as the only way forward.
The consequence of inaction threatens the future of democracy. The West is losing the argument,
while the China model, despite its widening wealth gap, human rights abuses and disregard for
the democratic process, is gaining credibility. The developing world sees that a Chinese
leadership, unbothered by the inconvenience of elections and true public accountability, can
create a long-term economic plan and follow it through uninterrupted.
While opening up its economy to the outside world, the government has retained a high level of
control over strategic industries: energy, telecoms and banking, to name three. The developing
world sees the fundamental advantage of this type of government intervention: business and
trade can be used to bolster the regime and strengthen China's position in the international
community.
As US journalist Joshua Kurlantzick notes, when China sees an investment opportunity overseas,
it can compel its major banks to boost lending to Chinese companies operating in that area. "In
short, the China model sees commerce as a means to promote national interests," he observes.
By contrast, a widening gap between the rich and poor is causing many to doubt the validity of
the Western model. Many Westerners are increasingly insecure about their own values and the
health and sustainability of their societies. And many Western governments are unwilling to
accept that present levels of inequality harm, rather than promote, innovation and
entrepreneurship.
At the very least, the West needs to acknowledge the huge damage that neo-liberalism has
inflicted on democracy over the past 30 years. Many economists, not just on the far left, now
indict the Reagan-Thatcher project of neo-liberalism for reversing the great postwar, baby-boom
march towards equal opportunity.
Neo-liberalism has become so pernicious that the accepted belief, promoted by advocates of free
market fundamentalism, is that the West came to dominate the world because it embraced small
government and privatisation. In fact, economic historians Robert Allen and Michael Lind have
demonstrated that unfree markets and big-government designs typified not only the East Asian
path to industrialisation, but also America's rise in the early 19th century.
They argue that wealthier countries started preaching to poorer countries about the need for free
trade - that is, to reduce tariffs designed to protect nascent industries - and the need to reduce
government size - that is, allow foreigners to buy up vital sectors of the economy - only after
they themselves had completed industrialisation on the back of very protectionist measures.
Equally dangerous is the myth perpetuated in the West that China has grown so rapidly because
it has embraced the neo-liberal model. This is patently false.
China has succeeded, thus far, because it reformed on its own terms, picking and choosing
elements of development models around East Asia - those of Japan, Singapore and Taiwan - and
adapting them to its own context. The Chinese model is, in fact, intended as an antidote to
Western neo-liberalism.
So what should the West do to counter the rise of the illiberal Chinese model? It must
demonstrate some candour about its own developmental path - in the past and in the future -
before it preaches to the developing world. It must invest more in education and in improving
infrastructure to avoid being overtaken and left behind by China. It must swallow its pride and
accept that it can learn some lessons from China in terms of long-term economic planning and
market intervention. Narrowing the inequality gap in the West is essential so the China model
does not gain further credibility on the back of purely economic success.
And it must truly acknowledge the fragility of democracy itself in order to realise what is at stake
here. As Israeli historian Irad Malkin noted: "Democracy existed for about 200 years in the
ancient world and has existed for about 200 years in the modern world, and other than that there
has been no democracy in the whole of human history. Oligarchies have always existed."
Niv Horesh is professor of modern history of China and director of the China Policy
Institute, University of Nottingham
Crisis and Transition, But Not Decline
Philippe C. Schmitter
Journal of Democracy, Volume 26, Number 1, January 2015, pp. 32-44 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2015.0004
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/565637
Access provided by University of Oregon (9 Nov 2018 21:44 GMT)
CRISIS AND TRANSITION,
but NOT DECLINE
Philippe C. Schmitter
Philippe C. Schmitter, professor emeritus in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, previously
taught at the University of Chicago and Stanford University. He is the
coeditor (with Guillermo O’Donnell and Laurence Whitehead) of the
seminal four-volume series Transitions from Authoritarian Rule.
There seems to be an overwhelming consensus among scholars and
politicians that democracy as a practice is in decline. An 18 August
2014 Google search for decline of democracy yielded more than 55.5
million results; Google Scholar, which searches only academic literature, still produced a hefty 434,000 hits. At the same time, however, it is
widely accepted that the desire for democracy as an ideal—that is, selfrule by citizens possessing equal rights and having equal influence over
the choice of leaders and the conduct of public affairs—has never been
greater or more broadly distributed. This gap between what is promised
and what is delivered has been an omnipresent feature of those longestablished regimes that I have called “really existing democracies,” and
it has been reproduced in newly established democracies as well. It is
the source of most of the historical struggles that have periodically led
to the reform of democratic institutions.
A widening of this gap between the real and the ideal characterizes
the present crisis—hence the growing pressure not to dismantle or destroy democracy as such, but rather to change the way in which it is
being practiced. No one seems to believe that either really existing democracies or newer democracies that have passed some threshold of
consolidation will in the foreseeable future regress to their status quo
ante. Moreover, there is simply no plausible alternative in sight, save for
a few models (for example, Chinese meritocracy, Russian neo-Czarism,
Arab monarchy, or Islamic theocracy) that are unlikely to appeal far
beyond their borders. In other words (to paraphrase a line in Giuseppe
Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard), democracy will definitely
Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 1 January 2015
© 2015 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Philippe C. Schmitter
33
survive, but only by changing. What these changes will be, however, is
by no means clear.
Some Misleading Evidence of Decline
Evidence for the recent crisis and decline of democracy rests on dubious conclusions from quantitative sources and selective inferences
from qualitative case studies. Freedom House has served as the “definitive” source for the former, and its annual report has been featuring
various versions of the “democracy-in-retreat” narrative since 2008. It
has based this assertion on a decline in the average scores of its compound indicator. This is especially misleading since many so-called
Free regimes have no room for improvement given the upper limits
of the variables used. For example, none of the reform measures to
be discussed below would increase the score of a single one of them.
Many Not Free regimes have no further room for decline, and many of
these are “failed states” that are locked into civil wars and have no regime at all. It is mostly the Partly Free or hybrid democracies that have
shown variation—and some of that has been upward. Moreover, small
changes in the average for the whole sample (which is what tends to
be used as the indicator for decline) can be attributed to a relatively
small number of cases, from Russia and its Eurasian former republics
to Bangladesh, Fiji, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. One
alternative quantitative source, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy, reports similar aggregate results, while another,
the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, shows no significant overall
change from 2006 to 2010.
Random public-opinion surveys in both new and established democracies routinely “discover” that a growing share of citizens feel that their
votes do not count and are disregarded by their leaders. Most dramatic
has been the decline in trust in core democratic institutions—namely,
elected politicians, political parties, and legislatures. Yet these same
surveys often reveal a similar decline in trust in nonelected authorities,
including the military and police, public administrators, and even scientists and physicians. In other words, skepticism has come to characterize
public opinion in general, even if it is focused most intensely on the political process. Interestingly, these surveys also tell us that public interest in politics has been rising along with the sense that politics actually
has a real impact on people’s lives. So the gap does exist, but so does the
awareness of it and, presumably, the desire to narrow it.
On the qualitative side, scholars have found a litany of “morbidity
symptoms” that illustrate the extent of decline in many really existing
and newly established democracies. At the top of the list, one usually
finds increasing distrust of elected politicians and representative institutions (especially political parties), followed by declining levels of elec-
34
Journal of Democracy
toral participation and party membership or identification, rising electoral volatility, and problems in forming stable governments.
Previously dominant centrist parties find that their ideologies are no
longer credible to the public and that they are losing votes to newly emerging populist parties of either the left or the right. Parliaments have become
less central to the decision-making process, having been displaced by the
concentration of executive power and a wider role for “guardian institutions” dominated by (allegedly) independent technocrats. Governing
cabinets include ever more unelected members who are chosen for their
“nonpartisan” status. Membership in and conformity to class-based intermediary organizations such as trade unions and employers’ associations
have declined, while large firms, especially financial ones, have gained
more direct access to the highest circles of decision making.
The “usual suspects” are typically cited as the generic causes of crisis
and decline. At the top of the list, one almost always finds globalization,
since it has supposedly deprived the nation-state of its former autonomy,
undermining government effectiveness and responsiveness to citizen demands. Multinational enterprises, international financial institutions, and
(at least in Europe) multilayered regional-governance arrangements have
imposed a complex mixture of constraints and opportunities that greatly
limit economic and social-policy agendas as well as the capacity to regulate and tax capitalists and their enterprises. Changes in the structure of
production and the sectoral composition of the economy have weakened
the collective consciousness of workers and blurred the class cleavage
that had long provided the basis for political parties on the left and right.
Politics has become a full-time profession rather than a part-time affair. Most of those who enter the field today expect to spend their entire
careers there, and they surround themselves with other political professionals such as speechwriters, media consultants, pollsters, and “spindoctors.” Citizens have become increasingly aware that their representatives and rulers live in an entirely different and self-referential world.
Voting preferences are now based less on class, sector, and professional
interests and more on individualistic concerns about personal lifestyles,
ethical convictions, and the role of government.
If all that were not enough, citizens—many of whom now have access
through the Internet to vast sources of independent and critical information—have become better educated and more skeptical about the motives
and behavior of their politicians. Moreover, enormous flows of South-North
migration have so altered the demographic composition of most really existing democracies that a substantial share of their populations have no citizen rights or prospects for gaining them. This growing diversity challenges
the notion of a common demos with a shared fate, and hence a mutually
accepted sense of the public good. Notwithstanding the current populist
resistance to ethnic pluralism, really existing democracies will have to find
a way to accommodate diversity and reform their institutions accordingly.
Philippe C. Schmitter
35
More conjunctural factors are also supposed to have played an important role. First and foremost, the collapse of Soviet-style “people’s
democracy” has deprived Western democracies of one of their primary
bases of legitimacy—namely, their superiority over their communist rivals. Since the end of the Cold War, the democracies of the West have
had to satisfy the more demanding criteria of equality, access, participation, and freedom promised by democratic ideals. The latest wave
(which, pace Huntington, is not the “third wave”) of democratization
that began in 1974 also contributed to a general rise in expectations
and unrealistic assertions about “the end of history.” Neoliberal reforms
failed to produce their promise of continuous growth, fair distribution,
and automatic equilibration, leading by 2008 to the Great Recession,
which many democracies (especially in Europe) proved incapable of
mitigating, much less resolving.
At the core of this consensus about crisis and decline lies the heavy emphasis that the practice of democracy places upon representation—especially via competition among political parties in regular and fair elections
that are expected to produce, directly or indirectly, legitimate rulers.1
Admittedly, parties have never been “loved” by citizens—partly because
they are an overt expression of the interests and ideological cleavages that
divide them, but also because there is ample reason to suspect, as the German sociologist Robert Michels long ago asserted, that they are unusually
susceptible to oligarchy and prone to self-serving corruption.2
In the face of such abundant evidence, convincing arguments, and
massive consensus, how can anyone doubt that democracy is in decline?
Some Emerging Evidence of Transition
From my perspective as a “card-carrying” transitologist, it should
come as no surprise if I conclude that democracy is not in decline, but
that it is in crisis and in the process of transition from one type to another3—although it is not at all clear what the new type (or types) will be
or whether any new type will be an improvement over existing practices.
Indeed, it is precisely this uncertainty about the rules of the game that
is the predominant characteristic of all transitional situations. In generic
terms, one might label this emerging configuration “post-liberal” (but
definitely not “illiberal” or “anti-liberal”). Of course, this label does not
convey much specificity of meaning, other than opening up the prospect
for the outcome to be something qualitatively different.4
As is often the case with such debates, the answer hinges not on the
facts but on the concepts and suppositions that determine which facts are
salient and why. Not surprisingly, this begins with the definition of democracy that one uses. In 1991, Terry Karl and I proposed in these pages
a very generic definition of democracy that involves neither specific institutions nor presupposed outcomes: “Modern political democracy is a
36
Journal of Democracy
[regime] . . . in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the
public realm by citizens, [usually] acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives.”5 I would now add
for greater clarification: “and in which citizens comply voluntarily with
their rulers’ decisions—even when they have not explicitly approved these
decisions—because they regard them as having been taken legitimately.”
In other words, democracy is a two-way process (or better, set of processes) in which citizens with equal political rights and obligations have
at their disposal regular and reliable means to access information, demand
justification, and apply sanctions on their rulers; in exchange, citizens
accord these rulers legitimacy and agree to respect their decisions, even
when disagreeing with them. This definition of democracy has two key
implications for how we should determine whether democracy is in decline or in transition: This means that it would be a mistake 1) to focus
exclusively on a single set of institutions (usually, the conduct of elections
and the behavior of political parties) or 2) to make a judgment based on
indicators of the substantive performance of a given democracy.
All that should count are the effectiveness of the processes of accountability and the willingness of citizens to accord legitimacy. Both
can change for a variety of reasons, including the introduction of new
communications technologies, the diffusion of novel ideals across borders, or the creation of new channels of representation. The core assumption is that if rulers know they will be held to account and if citizens believe their rulers to be legitimate, then the substantive outcomes
will be satisfactory given the resources available. This definition implies that not all democracies should be held to the same standard of
performance—for the simple reason that not all citizens will collectively
want the same things and not all polities will be capable of producing
the same level of public goods. Tocqueville famously argued that once
democracy had established equality in the realms of politics and law,
citizens would demand equality in social status and material wealth.6 He
was right about the tendency, but wrong about the eventual outcomes.
Contemporary really existing democracies differ considerably and consistently in their distributive consequences.7
Another way of expressing this argument is that one should clearly
separate the criteria for assessing the quality of democracy from those
used to assess the quality of government. The former is about processes
connecting the rulers to the ruled in ways that ensure mutual accountability, while the latter concerns the outcomes that ensue from the exercise of
power, whether democratic or not. This implies the possibility that some
autocracies could outperform some democracies—delivering, say, higher
economic growth, lower inflation, better distribution of wealth, fuller
employment, and in some cases even less corruption, stricter observance
of the rule of law, and greater protection of human (but not civil) rights.
Much of the anecdotal evidence for decline involves how governments—
Philippe C. Schmitter
37
more and more of which admittedly belong to democratic regimes—are
performing, not how democracy as such is doing.
Some Emerging Evidence of Reform
About a decade ago, Alexander Trechsel and I put together for the Council of Europe a working group of academics and politicians on the theme
“The Future of Democracy in Europe.” During the ensuing discussions, the
participants quickly became aware that there was a great deal of both political imagination and actual experimentation with regard to institutional
reforms.8 Much of this thinking and effort had gone largely unobserved
because it was taking place at the local level or in a more or less sporadic
fashion. In the case of newer democracies, pervasive disparagement of the
intrinsic deficits of their regimes—that their democracies were “flawed,”
“partial,” “hybrid,” “pseudo,” “façade,” “illiberal,” “stalled,” “low-intensity,” “delegative,” “defective,” or merely “electoral”—obscured the fact
that they were often engaging in innovative practices.9
To the best of my knowledge there exists no complete inventory of
these reform efforts. To list them all and attach them to their specific
sites would greatly exceed the space accorded to me (as well as my expertise). Thus, I will simply offer readers a representative sample and
invite them to pursue the task in a more systematic fashion:10
1) Referendums and initiatives are probably the most widely and frequently used innovation, as the kinds of issues that have become subject
to such measures at both the national and subnational levels have proliferated. Granted, some of these referendums and initiatives are merely
consultative, and many require a high threshold to become valid; nevertheless, they have given citizens in many polities a much more direct
channel of participation in decision making than they had in the past.
2) “Participatory budgeting” is one reform that has been extensively studied since it was first implemented in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and
then spread across several continents. Participatory budgeting involves
convoking an assembly of self-selected or randomly chosen citizens to
debate the distribution of some proportion of a governmental unit’s total budget. A wide array of such forums have emerged over time, and
their terminology differs—e.g., “consensus conferencing,” “citizens’
panels,” “citizens’ juries,” “planning cells,” “issue forums,” “citizens’
assemblies,” even “deliberation day”—as do the rules that govern them,
but the intent is the same: to bring ordinary citizens closer to the policymaking process by personal participation.
3) The party primary, a device for selecting from among candidates
competing for a political party’s nomination, had long been a peculiarity of U.S. politics. In recent decades, this practice has invaded other
38
Journal of Democracy
countries and continents. The modalities differ, but in generic terms primaries give party members (or even ordinary citizens) the capacity to
penetrate firmly entrenched party oligarchies. Some places have even
opted for “open primaries,” in which candidates of all parties compete
and the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, become the
nominees for the general election. Another reform that could affect partitocrazia is the introduction of NOTA (“None of the Above”) as an
alternative choice on the ballot. In some versions, if a sufficient number
of citizens check this box, the election has to be held again.
4) Public funding for political parties is yet another relatively recent innovation—one that has spread from Europe’s really existing democracies
to newer ones. The presumed objective is to counter the tendency toward
disproportionate contributions from wealthy citizens and private corporations by shifting the burden to compulsory contributions from taxpayers as
a whole. This usually involves some distribution formula based on the previous electoral results, which would seem to reinforce incumbent advantage
and, hence, oligarchy. Because the monitoring of these funds is often deficient and their receipt does not preclude the raising of additional funds from
private sources, they have been a persistent source of corruption allegations.
5) In recent decades, quotas for women electoral candidates or even
as members of the legislature have become almost standard in many
really existing democracies. In some places, this is a formal legal obligation, even a provision of the national constitution. Elsewhere, political parties have adopted the practice voluntarily—at first mostly leftleaning parties, but increasingly parties in the center and on the right as
well. Meanwhile, some countries have simply legislated that one-half or
some lower proportion of seats in the legislature be reserved for women.
An additional measure, called “zipping,” requires electoral lists to order male and female candidates alternately. Efforts to promote gender
parity have spread to the process of government formation as well: The
informal practice of appointing women to head half of all ministries is
becoming a norm. Less common is the notion that other social minorities that historically have suffered discrimination—ethnic, linguistic, or
religious—should benefit from similar policies.
6) The devolution of greater powers to subnational political units is
becoming more common. Most newly established democracies and several well-established West European democracies have recently transferred considerable decision-making authority to regions, provinces, or
municipalities that had previously been ruled by their respective central
governments. While full-scale federalism seems to be on the decline,
this more flexible form of decentralization should allow citizens to hold
their local governments more accountable.
Philippe C. Schmitter
39
7) Efforts to plan for the future have blossomed in response to the
frequent complaint that really existing democracies are intrinsically
“short-sighted”—tied to the electoral cycle or to immediate expressions
of public opinion and thus incapable of engaging in “forward thinking”
or anticipating future problems and preventing their negative impact.
Recent decades have witnessed a virtual explosion of “future commissions”—some within governments, others in think tanks or NGOs. It has
become increasingly obligatory for legislative proposals and referendums to be accompanied by an expert evaluation of their eventual costs
and consequences. In Hungary, there is even an “Ombudsman for Future
Generations” who performs this task on a regular basis.
8) The proliferation of freedom-of-information acts all over the world
has helped to keep citizens better informed about the behavior of their
rulers. These laws give individual citizens and civic associations access to the material that governments have collected—even to material
that is currently being used in the decision-making process. To be sure,
members of the general public may not always possess the time or skill
to mine these documents, the sheer volume of which has increased exponentially over the years with the increase in government surveillance.
Nevertheless, such laws make a modest contribution toward ensuring
the transparency upon which accountability rests.
9) New innovations in information and communications technology
(ICT) are beginning to have a significant impact on the practice of democracy. Their low cost and broad distribution, as well as the personal
anonymity that they offer, have given citizens access to sources of information that are difficult for established authorities to control or censor,
and that frequently reveal behavior that rulers would rather keep secret.
Parties and politicians have also felt compelled to use this technology to
connect with their followers. Some parties and candidates have even used
it effectively to raise funds and mobilize followers. Meanwhile, vast segments of civil society have made use of ICT to assemble “virtual” units of
collective action that are often critical of established authorities.
10) The next steps in this technological transformation have already
appeared in a few selected sites—namely, the use of electronic communications to influence the nomination of candidates and the formation of
party programs, to match voters’ personal preferences with the positions
of parties and candidates (so-called smart voting), and finally to actually
cast one’s vote. Several countries have extended this form of “e-democracy” into “e-government” by setting up kiosks or bureaus where citizens
can contact government agencies, download forms, and make complaints.
11) A few countries have introduced a novel system for funding civil
society. Citizens can choose to allocate a fixed percentage of their tax
40
Journal of Democracy
obligations to an organization (or organizations) of their choice from
among an approved list of associations, institutions, or agencies. Such
organizations thus become compelled to compete publicly and vigorously for these funds by disclosing what they have been doing and propose
to do in the future. Not only is the distribution of these funds an important financial resource for them, but it also serves as a proximate indicator of their legitimacy and reveals otherwise hidden citizen preferences.
12) The nature of citizenship—that most basic of democratic institutions—is beginning to change. There is a trend toward lowering the age
of political maturity to sixteen. Nationals living abroad are able to vote
at their respective embassies or consulates. Legally resident foreigners
are gaining some voting and consultative rights in the countries where
they live (especially at the local level), and in some places it has become
easier for them to acquire citizenship in their new home countries. The
true breakthrough will come when nationality, whether jus sanguinis
or jus soli, is separated from the status of citizenship. There is even a
de jure status for “supranational” citizenship in the European Union,
and the diffusion of human and civic rights across national borders and
their (admittedly erratic) enforcement by international or regional courts
have created a more extensive de facto system of citizen protection.
13) Representation by lot is one device that is hardly new. It was
present at the founding of demokratia in ancient Athens. As mentioned
above, some of the direct consultation of citizens on policy matters has
involved the random sampling of participants from those physically
present in a given constituency. A more indirect technique has been to
assemble a random sample of citizens, register their initial opinions,
subject them to a discussion of alternative points of view, test them
for potential changes in opinion, and then publicize the results. The assembling of such “deliberative mini-publics” for “interactive polling”
has become a common practice in Western democracies—although its
practical impact on either policy content or political legitimacy has yet
to be conclusively demonstrated (which, incidentally, is the case with
many of the innovations presented above).
14) According to the orthodox view of democracy, representatives owe
their legitimacy to having been elected in some regular, competitive, and
honest fashion. Yet there has been an extraordinary increase in the number of nonelected persons claiming this status on the basis of their professional or organizational expertise, their appealing personality, their commitment to shared norms, or even their celebrity—and there is abundant
evidence that many of them are accepted as such. Hardly a single leader
of a civil society organization or social movement owes his or her position
to a competitive electoral process, not to mention the movie stars and rock
musicians who speak on behalf of worthy causes and whole continents.
Philippe C. Schmitter
41
So far, almost every one of these institutional experiments has focused on reviving vertical accountability through political parties or
elections or oblique accountability through interest associations, social
movements, or communications networks. Liberal versions of democratic theory, however, place a distinctive emphasis on horizontal accountability. Guided by the more general principle that really existing
democracies are better off protecting citizens from tyranny than empowering them to act collectively, such checks and balances within the
decision-making apparatus are intended to reduce the potential threat
posed by mass citizen mobilization.
The three traditional sites of horizontal accountability—the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary—have experienced a rebalancing.
Legislatures have tended to decline, executive power has varied according to the policy agenda (with the conduct of war being one of the major
incentives for its growth), and judges (especially appellate judges) have
greatly increased their powers. This process of constitutional juridification has varied considerably, with the United States providing an extreme case at the national level and the EU creating an entirely new layer
of authority at the supranational level.
15) The establishment of a variety of “guardian institutions” is truly
novel. Such institutions hardly existed before, and where they did, they
played a much more subordinate role, but they now provide a wide variety
of potential checks on decisions made by elected officials or legislators.11
First and foremost among such institutions are independent central banks,
which are authorized practically to dictate economic and financial policy.
No democracy seems to be capable of doing without them. The central
banks have been joined by an extraordinary array of national “independent regulatory agencies.” In addition to the older ones that regulated
interstate commerce, transportation, public health, worker safety, food
products, drugs, professional ethics, consumer protection, and the like, we
now find electoral commissions, human-rights tribunals, and anticorruption agencies. These have all been deliberately “chartered” in such a way
as to avoid political interference (in other words, democracy) and handed
over to experts who will not bend to pressure from citizens or rulers, or
be captured by those whom they are supposed to regulate. If this were not
enough, these efforts are often seconded by global institutions such as the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and innumerable other standard-setting and standard-enforcing
institutions. The EU has not only its own central bank, but also more than
thirty regulatory agencies. No wonder citizens complain that they have
no effective influence over policy; their politicians can hide behind this
screen of supranational actors and pretend that they have no choice but to
obey Washington, Brussels, or wherever.
42
Journal of Democracy
No clear pattern emerges from the reform efforts sketched above,
except that it appears not to be true that the practice of liberalism—
political or economic—will inexorably produce a satisfying and stable
equilibrium. So far, there is none in sight. In some cases, there are traces
of “pre-liberal” democracy, with its enhanced role for direct citizen participation and occasional use of selection by lot. In others, especially in
the devolution of territorial authority and the emphasis on freedom of
information, one might be led to conclude that “more-liberal” democracy is emerging, especially when these practices are combined with such
substantive measures as the widespread deregulation of commercial and
financial transactions, stronger protections for property rights, and the
dismantling or downgrading of various policies of social protection.
Yet most of the reforms hint at a novel configuration that might be
called “post-liberal.”12 Such a configuration would be rooted in the extension of public consultation on policy and budgeting issues, broader
definitions of citizenship, public financing of political parties and citizen-chosen civil society organizations, quotas for women, “guardian
institutions” designed to protect citizens from fraud and exploitation,
the creation of “future commissions” to examine the potential impact of
government decisions, and (why not?) the proliferation of self-selected
persons claiming to represent a wider diversity of causes and places.13
Another, less obvious characteristic of this emerging type of democracy is its ambiguous attachment to the national state. Much of what
this form of democracy is seeking to accomplish would require passive
consent or active cooperation across its borders, up to and including
the formation of supranational norms and institutions. The maxim that
really existing democracy can only be practiced within really existing
national states seems destined to be challenged.
Any alternative to “really existing” liberal democracy—except perhaps
for more liberal and less democratic rule—is bound to be plagued by serious problems of “agency.” However intellectually appealing this alternative
may seem, it is usually impossible ex ante to specify which actors (or what
combination thereof) would support such changes, how much of the transition costs they would be willing to bear, and how the reforms might be
successfully and democratically implemented. Once a revolutionary rupture
with the previous institutions and practices of liberal democracy has been
ruled out—as seems to be the case for the foreseeable future—it is hard to
see the potential basis for the sort of sustained social or political support that
any combined and persistent reformist campaign would need. So far, all one
can observe is a series of isolated and tentative efforts—many of which have
yet to make much of a difference. It is almost impossible to overestimate the
enormous entropy built into the institutions and practices of today’s really
existing democracies and the attendant difficulty in convincing people to
accept new ideas about rather fundamental political and economic relations.
The earlier reforms presently embedded in liberal democracy were the
Philippe C. Schmitter
43
product of efforts to close an enlarged gap between the ideal expectations
and the real performance experienced by citizens, but they almost always
required at least the specter, if not the imminent threat, of revolution to
make the effort seem worthwhile. Today, however, revolutionaries are
rare, and their terrorist replacements strengthen rather than weaken the
will to retain the status quo. The actors who are presently challenging the
performance and the legitimacy of really existing democracy are not its
declared enemies; they are its avowed supporters. In other words, they are
citizens and groups who believe that they are improving democracy, although they have no coherent plan for doing so. Indeed, the task of reform
would be facilitated greatly if extremists on either the right or left were
self-avowedly seeking to replace liberal rules and practices with some
other form of government, but their efforts are presently inconsequential
and unconvincing, and in my opinion they are likely to remain so.
As long as the greatest threats to democracy are coming from its “normal
practitioners”—voters, citizens, deputies, special interests, movement activists, and “prominent personalities” engaging in their normatively sanctioned
behaviors, it will be far more difficult to convince such actors of the necessity
for a comprehensive package of institutional reforms. Contrary to past history, when such political transformations occurred only if a dedicated group
advocating a plausible alternative existed and succeeded in imposing its model, all that most citizens experience in their daily lives today are “symptoms of
morbidity” a` la Gramsci—a lot of grumbling, dissatisfaction, powerlessness,
and suboptimality, but hardly enough to motivate them to invest in a novel,
ill-defined, and as yet untested model of post-liberal democracy.
NOTES
This is an essay in “practical political theory,” not an article of political science. It is my
tentative effort to capture a complex set of interrelated phenomena in excessively general
terms and without the requisite empirical references. I am grateful to the Journal of Democracy for its indulgence.
1. For a more detailed analysis of the shrinking role of political parties in really existing democracies, see Philippe C. Schmitter, “Parties Are Not What They Once Were,” in
Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, eds., Political Parties and Democracy (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 67–89.
2. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of Oligarchical Tendencies
of Modern Democracy (1911; New York: Crowell-Collier, 1962). More recently, his “Iron
Law of Oligarchy” has been rebaptized by the Italians as “partitocrazia,” an expression
that has rapidly diffused throughout the political universe.
3. Three non-transitologists have arrived at the same conclusion: In their introduction
to The Future of Representative Democracy, Sonia Alonso, John Keane, and Wolfgang
Merkel point out that several authors in the volume suggest that “what we are witnessing
is not so much a crisis of representative democracy as its transformation into something
new”; Alonso, Keane, and Merkel, eds., The Future of Representative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 17. Admittedly, I was a participant in this
44
Journal of Democracy
research group and, hence, one of the authors. Subsequently, however, a distinguished political theorist has arrived at the same conclusion quite independently, as I discovered after
writing this essay: Alessandro Ferrara, “Judging Democracy in the Twenty-First Century:
Crisis or Transformation?” NoFo 10 (2013), www.helsinki.fi/nofo/NoFo10FERRARA.pdf.
4. This has already happened several times in the past. The root concept of democracy
persists, but its translation into rules and practices has been subject to three successive
“revolutions,” to use the expression of Robert Dahl; see his Polyarchy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1971). For an extension of this argument to include five subsequent
revolutions within really existing democracies, see Philippe C. Schmitter, “The Future of
‘Real Existing’ Democracy,” European University Institute (unpubl. ms., 2007).
5. Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What Democracy Is . . . and Is Not,”
Journal of Democracy 2 (Summer 1991): 75–88. This essay has been widely reprinted in
several languages.
6. In the first volume of his Democracy in America, Tocqueville makes this one of his
founding observations about democracy: “The gradual development of equality of conditions
is therefore a providential fact, and it has the principal characteristics of one: it is universal,
it is enduring, each day it escapes human power; all events, like all men, serve its development”; see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1:6. In the second
volume, published some five years later, Tocqueville expresses some doubts about the impact
of this “providential fact” and envisages the possibility of the development of an industrial
aristocracy in America and even of an eventual despotism (2:530–34, 661–65).
7. Looking over the abundant literature on the “quality of democracy,” one is impressed by the extent to which it presumes that the features of the Scandinavian democracies are universally appreciated and therefore occupy a prominent place among its criteria
for excellence. Is it really a relevant question to ask why Brazil has not attained the standards of, say, Sweden—or even if Brazilians wish to become Swedish?
8. Philippe C. Schmitter and Alexander H. Trechsel, eds., The Future of Democracy in
Europe: Trends, Analyses and Reforms (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2004).
9. I am indebted to Leonardo Avritzer for my awareness of this and for his research,
which demonstrates that the flow of innovations is not exclusively from really existing
democracies to newly existing ones. The latter have much to contribute to the former.
10. For a more extensive list of potential as well as actual reforms, see Schmitter and
Trechsel, Future of Democracy, which offers 29 of them.
11. See Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989) for the initial observation.
12. For this distinction between “pre-liberal,” “more liberal” and “post-liberal,” see
Philippe C. Schmitter, “Democracy’s Future: More Liberal, Pre-Liberal, or Post-Liberal?,” Journal of Democracy 6 (January 1995): 15–22.
13. For my very tentative effort at imagining what such a post-liberal democracy might
eventually look like, see “The Prospect of Post-Liberal Democracy,” in Karl Hinrichs,
Herbert Kitschelt, and Helmut Wiesenthal, eds., Kontingenz und Krise. Institutionenpolitik in kapitalistischen und postsozialistischen Gesellschaften. Claus Offe zu seinem 60.
Geburtstag (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000); “Un esbozo del posible aspecto de una democracia ‘post-liberal,’” in Jose Felix Tezanos, ed., Clase, estatus y poder en las sociedades
emergentes: Quinto foro sobre tendencias sociales (Madrid: Fundación Sistema, 2002),
587–98.
Purchase answer to see full
attachment