It's the Enlightenment, Stupid

I'm busy reading Will Hutton's book The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century and it's excellent stuff.  Hutton tells us that China's GDP grew by one-third. Fixed investment has tripled in six years; exports have quintupled.  Everything that China does now effects us directly, such is the speed and scale of Chinese economic growth.  The problem is that such an economy is not sustainable if it continues to be buttressed by the corrupt and authoritarian rule of the one party state.  A collapse in Chinese growth will have upheavals for China and the world and Hutton wants to make a case about what both China and the West should do to avoid such a catastrophe.

Hence the title of one of his chapters, it's the Enlightenment, stupid.  Without what Hutton terms "Enlightenment institutions" - a free and independent press, an independent and honest judiciary, autonomous civic organizations - the party's rampant corruption cannot be controlled, despite periodic anti-corruption campaigns conducted by the party itself. Without well-founded financial institutions, low-cost crony loans from state banks to state industries encourage inefficiencies and distortions and destroy any impulse to improve accountability or transparency. The party's style of Leninist corporatism, staggeringly wasteful of raw materials and energy, is propped up by technically bankrupt state banks that use the peasants' savings, just as Mao did, to fund rapid, but not necessarily productive, industrialization and urbanization.

Without civic, political or legal controls, the party appeases its own constituency by allowing local officials, their snouts in the economic trough, to get rich at the expense of the population on whom they feed. In just 20 years, this has led to staggering inequalities of wealth, opportunity, health, education and life expectancy, as well as to environmental degradation on a terrible scale.  Hutton says that "because China must change, it will".  The question is how to avoid destabilizing the whole global trading system.

How the United States reacts is key to what might happen and a central element of his argument is that the Americans are turning their back on their own Enlightenment values by their rush to accept a hard nosed neo-liberalism and market fundamentalism that eschews global responsibilities and obligations.  The worst case scenario is two rival continental powers locked into economic war with each other and armed to the teeth, with any number of  incidents, from Taiwan to oil and gas reserves in the East China Sea, that could trigger a real casus belli. 

There is a strong case to be made for better global governance.  The history of globalization shows both advances and retreats and early on in the book Hutton speculates that we might see a rerun of the period up to 1914, with internal social strains and a fragmentation of the global architecture.  The key question then becomes will the major countries of the west, who are crucial to a possible re-writing of the rules of the global system, have the economic strength and the political conviction to maintain social stability and open political systems?

Power Shift:Do we need better global economic institutions? happens to be the title of a new publication from the left of centre think tank The Institute for Public Policy Research.  The author, Ngaire Woods, sees a number of "innovating forces" pushing for change in the way international institutions work, among them newly powerful countries like China, Russia, India and Brazil who are pushing to make their voices heard on the international scene.   In her conclusions she  remind us that:

The new globalisation of the late 20th century is not just economic. The rhetoric and politics of international relations have been globalised – including the case against globalisation. Spurred by a sense of inequality and injustice, people across the world are forging a new politics of resistance. Until now, multilateral institutions have failed to address this. But they now have an opportunity so to do. In the world economy, institutions exist not solely to deal with market failures. As the Great Depression of the inter-war years demonstrated, institutions are also vital for defining shared values and purposes. They can create – or erode – confidence in cooperation.

I would also want to add that "defining shared values and purposes" is something that I would want to link with the broadly based values of the Enlightenment that Hutton talks about in his book.  There are many on the left, caught up in the fragmented politics of identity, that hesitate to use such a western-centric term as the Enlightenment.  There are also those, like John Gray in his review of Hutton's book (here), who disparage the term as something akin to a religious faith, (although Norm dispatches that one quite well).  Maybe it's a sign of how far things have changed in the last twenty years or so but it seems to me that standing for open political and economic systems, and supporting global institutions that are based on legitimacy as well as effectiveness, should be central to the politics of the left. 

Comments

[cian]

jeez gerry how do you get thru so many books. Id love to comment but poor will has just joined a very long queue!