IT IS OFTEN ASSERTED that the world is under the unipolar dominance of the United States, the sole global superpower with an uncontested military and vast economic capacity. The impotence of international Communism has changed the counterbalance to America's great weight in the world. However in Communism's vacuum I would like to posit that there has arisen three competing global ideologies in this turbulent era, America's practical power aside. Taken as a whole, each ideology is a distinct Weltanschauung -- a comprehensive view of the world. Each world view competes for global dominance as a basic strategy to survive modernity.
The First Weltanschauung is liberalization. The West -- both America and Europe, despite their mutual aversion -- carry the mantle of the Enlightenment, working to maintain and promote free democratic societies. Though they vastly differ in their evolution, it's like comparing Protestants to Catholics: both fundamentally accept the same faith but differ in its practice. America and its formidable military takes an offensive approach by attempting to expand liberalizing democracy to the dark, threatening corners of the world. Europe focuses its soft power by exercising realpolitik in a more defensive posture. Within the liberal world's heart are deep, bitter divisions that threaten its cogency, as can be seen in transatlantic discord.
The Second Weltanschauung is prosperous autocracy. China actively promotes that democracy does not necessarily equate to freedom. The Middle Kingdom's economic buoyancy is the basis for the case that autocracy alone can create prosperity. Prosperity can be compellingly misconstrued as freedom; wealth certainly can be liberating. But China is loudly promoting reformed capitalist autocracy to the four corners of the Earth as an alternative to democracy while they pursue raw materials for their vast, expanding population. Indeed, the dark corners of the world might benefit at first under the steady hand of an autocratic economic boom that suppresses dissent while maximizing profits. But autocratic prosperity could be misconstrued as freedom, at the expense of human rights. Within the autocratic world's heart is an inherent distrust of similar regimes, which are often nationalist, weakening their full unified potential for global dominance.
The Third Weltanschauung is politicized religion, revitalized in the modern era. Across the world, the barrier between church and state is thinning and cracking as people chafe from the modern condition. One example is America's affinity for a Christian 'Moral Majority' and government funded faith-based social solutions, or presidential deference to 'Intelligent Design' over evolution. But the most lethal, insidious and overbearing incarnation of the Third Weltanschauung is global Islamofascism. At the root of all politicized religions are legitimate questions regarding the moral and spiritual challenges of modernity. But taken to logical extremes, blurring the distinction between faith and state promises illiberality incarnate. And as history amply shows, within politicized religion's heart are fundamental divisions of faith, preventing the global preeminence of one religion.
These three comprehensive world views are the essential ideological attractors for the millions of people who live in today's world.
Recently the journal Foreign Policy published a much-referenced series of articles entitled The Failed States Index. Included with the articles is the Failed States Index Map. On this global map countries are classified as borderline, endangered or critical failed states. It graphically depicts how nearly half of the world's nations are ebbing towards the abyss of anarchy.
In the 9/11 era the most dangerous threats to the modern world come from failed states. Before 9/11 we viewed other industrialized nations as having the greatest capacity for harm. Some remain potentially threatening. But the era of terror, politicized religion, ubiquitous communications, cheap technology and the escaping genies of mass destruction have made failed states an incubator of global turmoil. The glaring exception is China, which does not appear threatening on the Failed States Index Map. China's astounding growth and autocratic government might evolve into a threat, or as a post-Communist failed state in its own right.
If Foreign Policy's Failed States Index is accurate, half the world is closing down and becoming the dark nether regions of chaotic despair. From the perspective of the people who live in failing states, the Three Weltanschauungs might appear to have equal merit and risk. Each offers order provided by a systemic world view, each making a moral case. Each one defines freedom in opposite terms from the other two. Freedom is defined as individual rights, or as prosperity, or as transcendence. Freedom from oppression, from poverty and from the shackles of earthly limitations are legitimate choices. It's a bazaar out there in Darkworld,. The Three Weltanschauungs are for sale, promoted by powerful, persuasive entities.
It is not my intention to suggest that Chinese autocracy or Islamic fascism are morally equivelent to American or European democracy. But if Failed States are indeed failures, they are populated by people who can lay no claim of legitimacy to any of the three Weltanschauungs that influence the world. People in a failed state, if in a position to choose or be influenced, pose the most fundamental of questions: What is freedom? Is it better to have the vote and be poor, or wealthy and have no rights? Is it better to eschew secularity and money for spiritual fulfillment? From their perspective, which Weltanschauung speaks the most earnestly and offers the best future?
All three weltanschauungs address important questions that are being asked by millions of people in failing states, much less more prosperous ones. It's good that Foreign Policy visualized a map of the world's failing states; but it is also important to identify the basic persuasions that confront these dark corners of the world.
While it is true that people in the Failing World (formerly known as the Developing World) are faced with the fundamental issues of survival, their condition also represents a moral challenge on all levels. From their perspective, each Weltanschauung's imperfections might seem equivalent, even if we think they are not. And it is the Failing World that might be where the planet's fate lies. Our fate is tied to this roiling, growing half of the planet that must find a moral center to transcend anarchy.
Each of the three Weltanschauungs has a decadent component that threatens its survival. The first Weltanschauung -- liberalization -- suffers debasement from the excesses of capitalism and socialist utopianism. Though they are at odds, the net result of each system produces a lot of narcissism, whether it is the materialist of consumerism, or the spiritlessness of the nanny state.
Chinese prosperous autocracy so far comes at the expense of a large underclass under a harsh, repressive rule. Clearly, a breaking point might be coming in China -- but even if the PRC is overthrown, what will probably supplant it might remain autocratic, and certainly free market.
Islamofascism is curiously old but new. Old, because it's Islam; the Caliphate is an old dream. New, because it is defining 21st century conflict like no other force in the world with asymmetrical warfare and the inversion of modern infrastructure to destroy it. Nowhere does there appear to be a long-lasting Islamic state that is prosperous and free, at least by Western standards. Like the secular autocrats of China, Islamic fascists repress to control. Unlike the autocrats, they have a potent, ancient ideology that appeals to those who seek relief from modernity's wages.
The one thing that history seems to reveal time again is that no one knows who's going to fold first. The West might, with its self-conscious dithering and trepidation over its own power. So much of the world's current security rests on America's ability protect it. America might become over-stretched. China's government might be broken by popular backlash from an economy that is prosperous for some but impoverishing for many. Islamofascists might only get as far as endless disruption without making any real political gains in opposing secularity; they offer no real spiritual alternative for living on this earth, only offering a glittering afterlife.
Each Weltanschauung may not be a wholly legitimate response to modernity, but all three pose legitimate questions as to how to address it. Failed states are confronted with all three ideologies. From their perspective, it isn't obvious which Weltanschauung is the best model to pursue, or be subjected to. We should know who our competitors are on the world ideology market.
Buddy pasted-in this entire story:
Syria after Lebanon: Hooked on Lebanon
by Gary C. Gambill
Please refrain from pasting-in huge essays in their entirety within the comments section. Instead, provide a link. Additionally, it would be best to hear out your comment to the post, and why this particular story about Syria is relevant. -- Cicero
Some swift remarks:
The second Weltanschauung might be the first just partially applied, that is, economic freedom is OK, but leave politics to the Nomenklatura. The Chinese may not question such a political system until it fails to provide them wealth. Any political system is good in happy times, the question in the long term is how they behave in crises, how they manage change.
I think the third is a reaction to leftish propaganda and moral relativism in the Western world, and to the spreading of freedom, that is, the first Weltanschauung, in some Arab autocracies. I would not put them together.
There is just one vision of the world, sometimes partially applied, and a reaction against it in some countries of the Arab world.
#1 (buddy): Is this fair use? Was it not possible to provide a link and excerpt?
More particularly, why is it relevant to this specific post?
Bugged,
Nort
J Aguilar: I must respectfully disagree with you... history has demonstrated time and time again that there is NOT merely one view of the world. Were that to be the case, there would be no gulfs of incomprehension, merely disagreement.
Instead, one finds places in the world where one cannot even find a mutual vantage point with which to begin a conversation on the world: one view inherently disallows the other. This is depressingly common.
As usual, “Cicero”, as thought-provoking essay.
I found your name for the second world-view, “prosperous autocracy” a little curious. Couldn't the other two world-views be called, just as reasonably, “prosperous liberalization” and “prosperous politicized religion”? Does anyone's world-view not include properity whatever that may mean and however magical the mechanism for attaining it might be?
prosperous autocracy -- this option only exist due to our own misjudgement that if we make the autocrats rich somehow they will become freedom loving. Freedom and democracy does not come from wealth. Wealth was a reward that came from freedom in this nation therby confirming freedom democracy as the succesfull way. What we have done in China is confirm to the people that Autocracy is the right way due to its success that was made by our leadership. If during the cold war we had allowed the Soviet companies to work on equal footing with our companies we would have lost. Socialism is a new age view of Kings, Nobles, then the peasants at the bottom. In our nation our labor forces cant compete with peasants(slavery). In freedom you have to hire your labor you dont just pay off the King so you can be allowed to go pay off the local noble so he will give you a couple of thousand peasant slaves to work your sweat shop. WTF The chineese should be cut off just as the Soviets were during the cold war and should be allowed to wither. Before our stupid idea of money will solve all that just proved Socialist Autocracy a viable alternative after it had been uterly discredited by the fall of the Soviet Union. We revitalized that failed idea our own discredited socialist did that to save thier faith. We need to recognize our mistake and correct it. Socialism is not equal like it shows on paper you always need Nobles(governors company Exec's ect..) and Kings(presidents parlimentarians ect..) then of course the poor peasants(slaves, you or me in a socialist governement). When you fight in a "two men enter one man leave" war of ideas like that begining after the cold war Democracy/Capitalism VS Socialist Autocracy/Gov Controled Buisness when you put your enemy down you dont give a hand to his #1supporter in the corner and help him be succesfull with you while not making any movement to throw away the beliefs and system you just had a to the death war with. By doing that we set out selves up to a future death struggle with a more powerful copy of a old enemy "will we win again????"
Folks,
I will be out most of this week -- please pardon my silence.
I would love nothing more than to expand on this essay based around the comments that are associated with it. I consider the premise to be in the rough right now.
Another fine post, Cicero, and thought-provoking in the sense that we in the West -- and in the United States in particular post-1945 -- have come to see ourselves, in theory, as the defenders and promoters of democracy, freedom, and peace (although in practice these ideals have, of course, fallen by the wayside from time to time).
Increasingly, however, it seems that we are becoming unwilling -- though not yet unable -- to carry out that mission. Whether it comes in the form of opposition to the war in Iraq from a hodgepodge of actual pacifists, old-style Communists recast as "anti-imperialists", or newly-fashioned "realists" arguing that leaving Saddam Hussein in power was the better choice, in the form of capitulatory political correctness that leads to the banning of Winnie the Pooh and demands that Great Britain change their flag to avoid offending Muslims, or even in the form of an increasing tendency toward abandoning "liberalization" in favor of what you call "politicized religion," an alarming number of Westerners simply no longer seem to value the spirit of the liberal societies they live in.
This rot, if you will, is probably most pervasive in Europe, but is quickly gaining currency in the United States as well, with those on the right, if you'll permit me a moment of stereotyping, tending to favor "politicized religion" and those on the left falling into the capitulatory, isolationist camp, broadly speaking. I think it is reasonably safe to say that with such pressures coming from such large constituencies from below -- and let's face it, those who support a muscular "liberal" (to coin a phrase) policy internationally but not a "political-religion" one domestically are, in terms of numbers, a rather small group and one bereft of good choices in candidates -- the days of seeing the case of "liberalism" strongly presented may be waning. If we're not willing to step up to the plate, someone else will.
That someone, of course, will be China. For all of its apparent appeal in certain corners of the globe, "politicized religion" in the form of Islamofascism is simply too barbaric and regressive to last long. China's model, on the other hand, could potentially offer a modicum of freedom (at least in comparison to militant Islam), a reasonable standard of living for many (in comparison to militant Islam or failed-state anarchy), and, for those at the top, a fairly high degree of control that's at least a few degrees removed from stoning women in the street and beheading non-believers.
We often hear, from certain, befuddled quarters, that an ascendent China would be a good thing, as it would serve as a "counterbalance" to "unilateral American power." I fear that just such a China -- and its potential future allies -- could very well be just what we'll be grappling with in the future, especially if the liberal West continues down the path of inward-looking, self-satisfied isolation.
At some point, the general feeling in the "liberal" West will have to return to the way of thinking that says that our way is indeed legitimate and desirable. But if we continue to cede the initiative to those who are willing to promote themselves as such, I fear that we'll soon find that the rest of the world will have passed us by in order to court the favor of those who are more confident and assertive about what they stand for.
Cicero,
Excellent post, very thought provoking indeed. I look forward to any expansion on this theme.
Yes, this is an excellent post; but I think that the interdependency of the first two, the liberal and the autocratic, has been ignored. China's wealth is dependent on the West's "excesses of capitalism and socialist utopianism" -- freedom is so costly, China at the moment offers a reduction in costs.
Plus, I think that Western "freedom" and Chinese "freedom" are moving toward symbiosis, and may ultimately come to the same thing: Americans, for instance, are so enmeshed in the system (capitalist, political), that they habitually capitulate to it; this system is not much different than the authoritarianism of capitalist China. (I.e., rather than grow one's own food, one goes to a supermarket; support for supermarkets is high; consequently, legal and political policies which favor supermarket owners will be supported.)
The niceties of individual freedoms (such as Internet access, free speech, etc.) are different between the two primary ideologies, but I wonder if the third (especially Islamic jihad) will push Western ideas of individual freedom toward a Chinese model even while the introduction of prosperity and technological advancement pushes Chinese ideas of person liberty toward a Western model -- resulting ultimately in a shared middle ground for both.
Property.
Or the Winds of Change Edition with comments by Joe</a.
Interesting analysis. But what about the American and European "progressives" as seen on display weekend before last? Which category do they fall into? They are certainly not children of the Enlightenment.
Probably the best fit is "politicized religion", although the religion is a nominally secular one.
Russ (#4)
Sorry, I meant one succesful (economic, politically) view of the world, being the second an adaptation, and the third (in the Arab countries) a reaction to the success of the first.
Of course, many Arabs, for instance, have another view of the world, that is the problem, they become frustrated when their way does not provide such wealth as a (classic) liberal democracy.
That has happened before: the formation of nation-states out of feudal kingdoms gave an advantage to those countries which carried out the process earlier. Then, painly, nation-states, the optimal then, evolved into classic liberal democracies, the optimal now. There is no other political model that provides today a better standard of living than a democracy. The Second view, recognizes this, but still does not want to give the power to the people. The Third view, again, agrees with it, that is the reason they hate us.
David Foster (#12)
In my opinion they are a flashback of Communism. When the Soviet Union broke apart, his international propaganda branch was left intact. Now this branch is operating coordinately (that is evident) but independently from Russia. They look for ways to continue fighting against capitalism and classic liberal democracy through issues such as the war in Iraq, the Greenhouse effect, globalization, moral relativism, a new interpretation of the Constitution (arguably the most dangerous of all), etc.
J Aguilar,
With that caveat, agreed. But I think this is also symptomatic of the West in general... our ruling systems are the outgrowth of philosophy... (China's mandarins may have been Confucian, but "the system" certainly was not) and we are the only civilisation to have inextricably tied the two. Therefore, ipso facto, when one speaks of "views," we're the only game in town -- witness that the best AQ can do to counter corrupt Western Civilisation is to kick back a more twisted version of one of our own failed ideologies.
Nice article, although the 3 competing ideologies put forward seem almost identical to the forms of government allowed in the PC game Civilisation 2!
Regarding China (PRC), the article claims:
"China actively promotes that democracy does not necessarily equate to freedom."
That democracy doesn't necesarily relate to freedom is hard to deny - freedom is also a product of economics. There's not much freedom in being an illiterate starving beggar, an impoverished peasant farmer or having to work long hours in a sweatshop to feed your kids - whatever form of government you live under.
"The Middle Kingdom's economic buoyancy is the basis for the case that autocracy alone can create prosperity."
No, the PRC is not claiming any such thing, merely that China's current political system is right for China at the moment. A rather idealised version of PRC ideology is:
1) China is stable, and economically successful. Rapid reform would threaten China's stability and prosperity, so must be slowly and carefully implemented (if at all).
2) China's political system is China's alone. Likewise other nation states' political systems are their internal affair and we won't interfere in them.
3) We will trade with anyone, irrespective of their political system.
4) We are concerned about other powerful countries who engage in frequent military intervention abroad.
The point about China is that the PRC doesn't really have a real ideology except stable economic development within China.
Another way to analyse political ideologies is more tied to economics and politics. ie. How should wealth be distributed? How should the means of production be owned and managed? How much do you accept rules imposed by a state on the individual? Should ordinary people be able to vote? My point is that neither the libertarian/authoritarian nor the left/right dichotomies have gone away or been superseded as is slightly implied here.
"The Third Weltanschauung is politicized religion, revitalized in the modern era."
The basic stance of Christian conservatives is that their values will play a part in their voting, and they will only vote for those who agree with their values.
The basic stance of Islamist-fascists is that if you don't accept sharia they will blow you up.
Why are these two grouped together under one world-view?
"Across the world, the barrier between church and state is thinning and cracking as people chafe from the modern condition."
Really? Across the world? Specifics.
Thinning and cracking? How so?
Anti-modernist reaction is nothing new. It goes back at least as far as Jonathan Swift. The Romantics, whether political radicals like the early Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron or reactionaries like the later Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, reacted against the same qualities of modernity. The High Modernists, again whether radicals or reactionaries, reacted against what they too considered to be the soulessness and anomie of modernity. Where there's that much smoke, I believe there is some fire. Let's face it, democracy has a strong tendency to degenerate into ochlocracy. We can watch it happen on the evening news. As wrong as he was about so many things, Marx had a point when he accused capitalism of reducing literally everything to the "cash nexus." The authoritarian "weltenschauung" would restrain the tendency of democracy to disorder and the religious weltanschauung would restore the true spirituallity which capitalist materialism dissolves. And one could argue (many have) that the disorder and spiritual deadness will eventually undermine the values on which democracy and capitalism depend. So while I certainly wouldn't want to live in China or the Middle East, and I have no use for "religious" people who blow up children to restore a spirituallity killed by modernity, I do have some sympathy for the other two weltanschauungs.