Whose World Is It Anyway?

Whose World Is It Anyway?

Mini Teaser: Charles Kupchan’s engaging new tome describes a world where global governance is collapsing and nations have only the barest common ground of agreement. But his analysis is marred by unworkable policy prescriptions and a static perspective.

by Author(s): Daniel W. Drezner

KUPCHAN IS competing in a crowded market for books of this ilk. Over the past decade, Niall Ferguson, Richard Haass, Fareed Zakaria, Ian Bremmer and many others have made variants of the triptych argument that 1) power is diffusing from the United States to the developing countries; 2) power is diffusing from states to nonstate actors; and therefore 3) global governance is going to be a horrible mess for quite some time.

Kupchan’s argument distinguishes itself from these other works on two counts. First, he displays some of the same strengths here as in his earlier work. In about two hundred pages of text, he manages to go from the breakup of the Carolingian Empire to what the world will look like in 2050 with clear, focused prose and argumentation. Try this at home; it is neither easy nor fun.

Furthermore, unlike his contemporaries, Kupchan is willing to get down into the weeds of historical institutionalism in examining why the political economy of the West does not resemble that of the “rest.” He embeds his argument in deep historical context to explain why the more advanced developing countries will reject the American-led order. When Kupchan argues that neither China nor Russia will be altering its authoritarian regime anytime soon, he explains why through adept references to their past histories. In connecting the flourishing of the Western idea to the historical evolution of the West itself, he is better placed than most to conclude that China, Russiaand others will not be evolving in the same way.

One of Kupchan’s shrewder points is that modernization is not the same thing as Westernization, even in countries that seem to inherit a large number of Western traits. Indeed, if anything, it is a bit disappointing that No One’s World does not elaborate on this point. India, for example, is the advanced developing state that most resembles the West in its secular, capitalist democracy. Despite a strong affinity for Western ideas, the growth of affluence in the subcontinent has had some peculiar effects. For example, one would expect that the combination of economic growth and increased female-literacy rates would increase gender equality in that country. A recent study in the Lancet, however, revealed a startling finding: the very regions and households with greater levels of education and per capita income also demonstrated the highest rates of sex-selective abortions. These are the families that can afford sophisticated ultrasounds that determine the sex of the baby in time for an abortion. If this is a trend in Western-friendly India, one can only imagine the persistence of non-Western ideas and ideals in places like China and the Middle East.

Even the more controversial dimensions of Kupchan’s argument—such as his distinction between Christianity and Islam—have a cruel ring of truth. I will leave it to theologians to debate whether No One’s World’s blanket assertion that Islam is a creed of faith and law is 100 percent accurate. Still, in thinking about the cultural gap between the West and the Islamic world, one only has to contrast how Afghans responded to the accidental burning of Korans with their reaction to the recent massacre of sixteen Afghan civilians by an American soldier in Kandahar. The latter led to complaints and peaceful protests; the former triggered nationwide violence. A member of Afghanistan’s Ulema Council patiently explained to the New York Times: “To Muslims, and especially to Afghans, religion is much higher a concern than civilian or human casualties. . . . When something happens to their religion, they are much more sensitive and have [a] much stronger reaction to it.”

One of Kupchan’s more beguiling conclusions is that it’s not as simple as the West versus the “rest.” Just because the oecd economies are declining relative to the so-called brics states doesn’t mean that the latter shares a cohesive vision of the future world order. As Kupchan writes, these nations diverge profoundly “on many dimensions, including political culture, path of socioeconomic development, and religion.” The standard fear voiced in this genre is a rising China dictating terms to the West. For Kupchan, there’s an even greater fear—a world that lacks the ability to agree on any common goals beyond the lowest common denominators.

DESPITE THESE strengths, No One’s World falls victim to some of the common maladies that afflict the “big-think” genre. Kupchan suffers from a pathology that’s unfortunately endemic to foreign-affairs authors more generally—opining at length about what ails the United States. This is an occupational hazard of international-affairs writers, and it leads to some of the most painful prose in existence. These diatribes all sound the same—growing polarization, gerrymandering, declining education standards, crumbling infrastructure and so forth. It’s not that these laments are necessarily wrong, but they are banal. Most of these analyses rely on decades-old Introduction to American Government arguments that are obsolete, and most of the proposed reforms are politically unfeasible.

Unfortunately, Kupchan falls into these traps. His policy prescriptions are shot through with clichés and unworkable proposals. He notes approvingly that “programs of national service can be effective antidotes to social segmentation.” On the next page, he laments that “the U.S. government has no high-level official or agency charged with long-range economic planning.” While this statement would surprise the employees at DARPA, it’s even more surprising that Kupchan thinks “the West can also learn from China and other state-led economies the benefits of strategic economic planning.” He badly overestimates the advantages of such plans: as a rule, countries that apportion such a high percentage of their economy to investment inevitably indulge in massively distorted allocations of capital. This was true in the Soviet Union, Japan and now China—Google “ghost cities” to see why. An American version of the Japanese economic-planning agency MITI or its Soviet equivalent Gosplan would be expensive at best and harmful at worst. Kupchan then proposes lengthening the congressional workweek and parties holding “internet referenda” to avoid the pernicious effect of special interests. The kicker comes when, after Kupchan suggests a program of “progressive populism,” he advocates “establishing technocratic panels of experts and politicians tasked with generating pragmatic, results-oriented proposals.” Beyond the patronizing tone, this proposal encapsulates entities like the 9/11 Commission, Iraq Study Group and the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission. The fact that the federal government did not listen to these “technocratic panels” suggests that such bodies might not be as effective as Kupchan would have you believe.

Beyond the portrait of the United States, there is a static snapshot element to much of the analysis in No One’s World. Unfortunately, the post-2008 world moves rather quickly, so some of Kupchan’s photos already look faded and dated. Claims about sustainable authoritarianism might have seemed sensible eighteen months ago, but they look far wobblier following the Arab Spring. Kupchan correctly observes that the Arab Spring does not mean that the Middle East will transform itself into a beacon of Jeffersonian democracy, but that’s not the point. The uprisings across the Middle East—as well as Russia—demonstrate that these authoritarian regimes are far more brittle than Kupchan presupposed. Furthermore, the ways in which these movements have played out expose a deeper flaw in Kupchan’s historical analysis. The Cairo uprising showed that the horizontal linkages that Kupchan sees as unique to the West are increasingly present in authoritarian states as well. If these linkages exist, then the preconditions for liberal democratic transitions are also present. No One’s World is right to bring up the religious dimension, but beyond the Middle East this does not appear to be that severe of an impediment.

This doesn’t suggest that the rest of the world will move ineluctably toward democracy. Still, many of the regions that Kupchan highlights as being “different” from the advanced industrialized world are not really all that different. It is true that most democracies in Latin America and Africa do not currently resemble the Madisonian democratic ideal. On the other hand, the same conclusion would have been reached after examining a snapshot of southern Europe in the 1970s or East Asia in the 1980s. Indeed, one could have made the same arguments about an absence of horizontal linkages, the heavy hand of the Catholic Church, and the ways in which the state had centralized economic and political authority. The fact that these countries now resemble their democratic allies suggests that the past is not destiny.

The moment one realizes that democracies evolve over time, Kupchan’s argument seems even more static. No One’s World assumes that either the strongman or populist variants of democracy will perpetuate themselves. If anything, the opposite seems to be true: the more extreme versions of Latin American left-wing populism are imploding, while Brazil looks more and more like a conventional secular democracy. Even countries as closed off as Myanmar seem willing to embrace myriad aspects of the Western model. Kupchan is certainly right that the rest of the world will not automatically migrate toward the West. But the migration will likely be greater than he thinks. A world in which China and Russia are the global “outliers” looks very different from the one depicted in No One’s World, which posits a much more heterogeneous assemblage of regime types.

Pullquote: According to Kupchan, it will be no one’s world: a mélange of competing ideas and competing structures will overlap and coexist. No one great power or great idea will rule them all.Image: Essay Types: Book Review