No cabe duda que las democracias estilo occidental pasan por un mal momento. Sus recurrentes crisis financieras no les permiten garantizar a todos sus ciudadanos el estado de bienestar que prometieron. La situación se agrava cuando los problemas de gobernabilidad pasan a ser el corolario de los económicos.
The Democratic Malaise
Globalization and the Threat to the West
By Charles A. Kupchan [i]
A crisis of governability has engulfed the world’s
most advanced democracies. It is no accident that the United States, Europe,
and Japan are simultaneously experiencing political breakdown; globalization is
producing a widening gap between what electorates are asking of their
governments and what those governments are able to deliver. The mismatch
between the growing demand for good governance and its shrinking supply is one
of the gravest challenges facing the Western world today. Voters in
industrialized democracies are looking to their governments to respond to the
decline in living standards and the growing inequality resulting from unprecedented
global flows of goods, services, and capital. They also expect their
representatives to deal with surging immigration, global warming, and other
knock-on effects of a globalized world.
But Western governments are not up to
the task. Globalization is making less effective the policy levers at their
disposal while also diminishing the West’s traditional sway over world affairs
by fueling the “rise of the rest.” The inability of democratic governments to
address the needs of their broader publics has, in turn, only increased popular
disaffection, further undermining the legitimacy and efficacy of representative
institutions. This crisis of governability within the Western world comes at a
particularly inopportune moment. The international system is in the midst of
tectonic change due to the diffusion of wealth and power to new quarters.
Globalization was supposed to have played to the advantage of liberal
societies, which were presumably best suited to capitalize on the fast and
fluid nature of the global marketplace. But instead, mass publics in the
advanced democracies of North America, Europe, and East Asia have been
particularly hard hit -- precisely because their countries’ economies are both
mature and open to the world. In contrast, Brazil, India, Turkey, and other
rising democracies are benefiting from the shift of economic vitality from the
developed to the developing world. And China is proving particularly adept at
reaping globalization’s benefits while limiting its liabilities -- in no small
part because it has retained control over policy instruments abandoned by its
liberal competitors. State capitalism has its distinct advantages, at least for
now. As a consequence, it is not just the West’s material primacy that is at
stake today but also the allure of its version of modernity. Unless liberal
democracies can restore their political and economic solvency, the politics, as
well as the geopolitics, of the twenty-first century may well be up for grabs.
DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS
Globalization has expanded aggregate wealth and
enabled developing countries to achieve unprecedented prosperity. The
proliferation of investment, trade, and communication networks has deepened interdependence
and its potentially pacifying effects and has helped pry open nondemocratic
states and foster popular uprisings. But at the same time, globalization and
the digital economy on which it depends are the main source of the West’s
current crisis of governability. Deindustrialization and outsourcing, global
trade and fiscal imbalances, excess capital and credit and asset bubbles --
these consequences of globalization are imposing hardships and insecurity not
experienced for generations. The distress stemming from the economic crisis
that began in 2008 is particularly acute, but the underlying problems began
much earlier. For the better part of two decades, middle-class wages in the
world’s leading democracies have been stagnant, and economic inequality has
been rising sharply as globalization has handsomely rewarded its winners but
left its many losers behind. These trends are not temporary byproducts of the
business cycle, nor are they due primarily to insufficient regulation of the
financial sector, tax cuts amid expensive wars, or other errant policies. Stagnant
wages and rising inequality are, as the economic analysts Daniel Alpert, Robert
Hockett, and Nouriel Roubini recently argued in their study “The Way Forward,”
a consequence of the integration of billions of low-wage workers into the
global economy and increases in productivity stemming from the application of
information technology to the manufacturing sector. These developments have
pushed global capacity far higher than demand, exacting a heavy toll on workers
in the high-wage economies of the industrialized West. The resulting
dislocation and disaffection among Western electorates have been magnified by
globalization’s intensification of transnational threats, such as international
crime, terrorism, unwanted immigration, and environmental degradation. Adding
to this nasty mix is the information revolution; the Internet and the profusion
of mass media appear to be fueling ideological polarization more than they are
cultivating deliberative debate. Voters confronted with economic duress, social
dislocation, and political division look to their elected representatives for
help. But just as globalization is stimulating this pressing demand for
responsive governance, it is also ensuring that its provision is in desperately
short supply. For three main reasons, governments in the industrialized West
have entered a period of pronounced ineffectiveness. First, globalization has
made many of the traditional policy tools used by liberal democracies much
blunter instruments. Washington has regularly turned to fiscal and monetary
policy to modulate economic performance. But in the midst of global competition
and unprecedented debt, the U.S. economy seems all but immune to injections of
stimulus spending or the Federal Reserve’s latest moves on interest rates. The
scope and speed of commercial and financial flows mean that decisions and
developments elsewhere -- Beijing’s intransigence on the value of the yuan,
Europe’s sluggish response to its financial crisis, the actions of investors
and ratings agencies, an increase in the quality of Hyundai’s latest models –
outweigh decisions taken in Washington. Europe’s democracies long relied on
monetary policy to adjust to fluctuations in national economic performance. But
they gave up that option when they joined the eurozone. Japan over the last two
decades has tried one stimulus strategy after another, but to no avail. In a
globalized world, democracies simply have less control over outcomes than they
used to. Second, many of the problems that Western electorates are asking their
governments to solve require a level of international cooperation that is
unattainable. The diffusion of power from the West to the rest means that there
are today many new cooks in the kitchen; effective action no longer rests
primarily on collaboration among like-minded democracies. Instead, it depends
on cooperation among a much larger and more diverse circle of states. The
United States now looks to the G-20 to rebalance the international economy. But
consensus is elusive among nations that are at different stages of development
and embrace divergent approaches to economic governance. Challenges such as
curbing global warming or effectively isolating Iran similarly depend on a
collective effort that is well beyond reach. Third, democracies can be nimble
and responsive when their electorates are content and enjoy a consensus born of
rising expectations, but they are clumsy and sluggish when their citizens are
downcast and divided. Polities in which governance depends on popular
participation, institutional checks and balances, and competition among
interest groups appear to be better at distributing benefits than at apportioning
sacrifice. But sacrifice is exactly what is necessary to restore economic
solvency, which confronts Western governments with the unappetizing prospect of
pursuing policies that threaten to weaken their electoral appeal.
ONE PROBLEM, THREE FLAVORS
In the United States, partisan confrontation is
paralyzing the political system. The underlying cause is the poor state of the
U.S. economy. Since 2008, many Americans have lost their houses, jobs, and
retirement savings. And these setbacks come on the heels of back-to-back
decades of stagnation in middle-class wages. Over the past ten years, the
average household income in the United States has fallen by over ten percent.
In the meantime, income inequality has been steadily rising, making the United
States the most unequal country in the industrialized world. The primary source
of the declining fortunes of the American worker is global competition; jobs
have been heading overseas. In addition, many of the most competitive companies
in the digital economy do not have long coattails. Facebook’s estimated value
is around $70
billion, and it employs roughly 2,000 workers; compare
this with General Motors, which is valued at $35 billion and has 77,000
employees in the United States and 208,000 worldwide. The wealth of the United States’
cutting-edge companies is not trickling down to the middle class. These harsh
economic realities are helping revive ideological and partisan cleavages long
muted by the nation’s rising economic fortunes. During the decades after World
War II, a broadly shared prosperity pulled Democrats and Republicans toward the
political center. But today, Capitol Hill is largely devoid of both centrists
and bipartisanship; Democrats campaign for more stimulus, relief for the
unemployed, and taxes on the rich, whereas Republicans clamor for radical cuts
in the size and cost of government. Expediting the hollowing out of the center
are partisan redistricting, a media environment that provokes more than it
informs, and a broken campaign finance system that has been captured by special
interests. The resulting polarization is tying the country in knots. President
Barack Obama realized as much, which is why he entered office promising to be a
“postpartisan” president. But the failure of Obama’s best efforts to revive the
economy and restore bipartisan cooperation has exposed the systemic nature of
the nation’s economic and political dysfunction. His $787 billion stimulus
package, passed without the support of a single House Republican, was unable to
resuscitate an economy plagued by debt, a deficit of middle-class jobs, and the
global slowdown. Since the Republicans gained control of the House in 2010, partisan
confrontation has stood in the way of progress on nearly every issue. Bills to
promote economic growth either fail to pass or are so watered down that they
have little impact. Immigration reform and legislation to curb global warming
are not even on the table. Ineffective governance, combined with daily doses of
partisan bile, has pushed public approval of Congress to historic lows.
Spreading frustration has spawned the Occupy Wall Street movement – the first
sustained bout of public protests since the Vietnam War. The electorate’s
discontent only deepens the challenges of governance, as vulnerable politicians
cater to the narrow interests of the party base and the nation’s political
system loses what little wind it has in its sails. Europe’s crisis of
governability, meanwhile, is taking the form of a renationalization of its
politics. Publics are revolting against the double dislocations of European
integration and globalization. As a consequence, the EU’s member states are
busily clawing back the prerogatives of sovereignty, threatening the project of
European political and economic integration set in motion after World War II.
As in the United States, economic conditions are the root of the problem. Over
the past two decades, middle-class incomes in most major European economies
have been falling and inequality has been rising. Unemployment in Spain stands
at over 20 percent, and even Germany, the EU’s premier economy, saw its middle
class contract by 13 percent between 2000 and 2008. Those who slip through the
cracks find a fraying safety net beneath them; Europe’s comfortable welfare
systems, which have become unsustainable in the face of global competition, are
being dramatically scaled back. The austerity stemming from the ongoing debt
crisis in the eurozone has only made matters worse. Greeks are as angry about
the EU-enforced belt-tightening as Germans are about having to bail out
Europe’s economic laggards.Europe’s aging population has made immigration an
economic necessity. But the lack of progress in integrating Muslim immigrants
into the social mainstream has intensified discomfort over the EU’s willingness
to accept more outsiders into its midst. Far-right parties have been the
beneficiaries of this anxiety, and their hard-edged nationalism targets not
only immigrants but also the EU. Generational change is taking its own toll on
popular enthusiasm for European integration. Europeans with memories of World
War II see the EU as Europe’s escape route from its bloody past. But younger
Europeans have no past from which to flee. Whereas their elders viewed the
European project as an article of faith, current leaders and electorates tend
to assess the EU through a cold -- and often negative -- valuation of costs and
benefits. The collective governance that the EU desperately needs in order to
thrive in a globalized world rests uneasily with a political street that is
becoming decidedly hostile to the European project. Europe’s institutions could
descend to the level of its politics, which would effectively reduce the EU to
little more than a trade bloc. Alternatively, national politics could again be
infused with a European calling, which would breathe new legitimacy into an
increasingly hollow union. The latter outcome is much preferable, but it will
require leadership and resolve that, at least for now, are nowhere to be found.
Japan, for its part, has been politically adrift since Junichiro Koizumi
stepped down as prime minister in 2006. Thereafter, the Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP), which had dominated Japanese politics throughout most of the
postwar era, stumbled badly, losing power to the Democratic Party of Japan
(DPJ) in 2009. The consolidation of a two-party system had the potential to
improve governance but instead produced only gridlock and declining public
confidence. Japan has cycled through six prime ministers in the last five years.
This past summer, public approval of the DPJ stood at 18 percent. The DPJ and
the LDP are as internally divided as they are at loggerheads. Policymaking has
ground to a halt even on urgent issues; it took over 100 days for the Diet to
pass legislation providing relief to the victims of last year’s earthquake, tsunami,
and nuclear disaster. The trouble began with the bursting of Japan’s asset bubble
in 1991, a setback that exposed deeper problems in the country’s economy and
led to a “lost decade” of recession. Japanese manufacturers suffered as jobs
and investment headed to China and the “Asian tigers.” The country’s
traditional social compact, by which corporations provided lifetime employment
and comfortable pensions, was no longer sustainable. The past two decades have
brought a long slide in middle-class incomes, rising inequality, and a spike in
the poverty rate from roughly seven percent in the 1980s to 16 percent in 2009.
In 1989, Japan ranked fourth in the world in terms of per capita GDP; by 2010,
its rank had plummeted to 24th. It was to address such problems that Koizumi
embarked on ambitious efforts to liberalize the economy and reduce the power of
bureaucrats and interest groups. His charisma and ample parliamentary support made
for significant progress, but his LDP and DPJ successors have been too weak to
keep the process moving forward. Japan is therefore stuck in a no man’s land, exposed
to the dislocations of a globalized economy yet not liberalized or strategic
enough to compete effectively.
BITTER MEDICINE
It is not by chance that the West’s crisis of
governability coincides with new political strength among rising powers; economic
and political vigor is passing from the core to the periphery of the
international system. And while the world’s most open states are experiencing a
loss of control as they integrate into a globalized world, illiberal states,
such as China, are deliberately keeping a much tighter grip on their societies
through centralized decision-making, censorship of the media, and
state-supervised markets. If the leading democracies continue to lose their
luster as developing countries chart their rise, the unfolding transition in
global power will be significantly more destabilizing. Conversely, a
realignment of the international pecking order would likely be more orderly if
the Western democracies recouped and provided purposeful leadership. What is
needed is nothing less than a compelling twenty-first-century answer to the
fundamental tensions among democracy, capitalism, and globalization. This new
political agenda should aim to reassert popular control over political economy,
directing state action toward effective responses to both the economic realities
of global markets and the demands of mass societies for an equitable
distribution of rewards and sacrifices. The West should pursue three broad
strategies to meet this challenge and thus better equip its democratic
institutions for a globalized world. First, when up against state capitalism
and the potent force of global markets, the Western democracies have little
choice but to engage in strategic economic planning on an unprecedented scale.
State-led investment in jobs, infrastructure, education, and research will be
required to restore economic competitiveness. Second, leaders should seek to
channel electorate discontent toward reformist ends through a progressive brand
of populism. By pursuing policies that advantage mass publics rather than the
party faithful or special interests, politicians can not only rebuild their
popularity but also reinvigorate democratic institutions and the values of
citizenship and sacrifice. Third, Western governments must lead their
electorates away from the temptation to turn inward. As history makes clear,
hard times can stoke protectionism and isolationism. But globalization is here
to stay, and retreat is not an option. None of these strategies will be easy to
implement, and embracing all of them together will require extraordinary
leadership and the political courage to match. But until such an agenda is
devised and realized, the democratic malaise will persist.
Copyright © 2002-2010 by the Council on
Foreign Relations, Inc. Published on Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.com) The Democratic Malaise
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/134048
[i] CHARLES A. KUPCHAN is
Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Whitney Shepardson
Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This essay is adapted from
his forthcoming book No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming
Global Turn (Oxford University Press, 2012).
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