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I'm honestly not sure how effective it is. A more moral stance would be not to deal with people who don't share your values and let them actively change if they want a seat at the table (and of course this ideal goes both ways), but there's less money to be made that way.
If you trade with someone, you help them get richer. Rich nations with rich citizens tend to be a lot less belligerent and much more reasonable, as citizens have so much more to lose.
Poverty and crazy authoritarian leaders are like peas and carrots.
In your metaphor, the more you trade with the drug dealer, the more they come to depend on income from selling drugs, and the less likely they will be to want to engage in armed conflict with rivals. After all, why risk dying when things are going so well? They’re making lots of money selling drugs.
Think of your own behavior. Would you break into a house to steal? Under normal circumstances, of course not. If you were starving, you’d think nothing of it. People under pressure behave violently.
> If you trade with someone, you help them get richer. Rich nations with rich citizens tend to be a lot less belligerent and much more reasonable, as citizens have so much more to lose.
> Poverty and crazy authoritarian leaders are like peas and carrots.
Honestly nothing here really is much of an argument. It's more of an aspiration. We want to trade with them and we want to do it morally and so we want your line of reasoning to be true.
Put it another way. We _are_ trading with many nations _despite_ of their moral short-comings. Why should they change? Our current trade issues with China have nothing to do with their human rights issues and everything to do with some belief (in some circles) that we can do better. We've known about abuses by the CCP for years and never batted an eye.
Honestly I think a huge test of your argument _is_ the current trade situation. Will China open up their markets more now or double-down and become more isolationist? The US seems to be finally putting monetary interests in second place so why not China?
Personally given that China has grown more powerful over the past few decades yet never let up on its threats of military belligerence against Taiwan (and in fact focused much of their military growth with that belligerence in mind), I see little to support the following statement:
> Rich nations with rich citizens tend to be a lot less belligerent and much more reasonable
But I definitely hope you're right!
edit: Another issue I take with this quote:
> If you trade with someone, you help them get richer. Rich nations with rich citizens tend to be a lot less belligerent and much more reasonable, as citizens have so much more to lose.
We are not trading with "someone" we are trading with many different people. The wealth isn't spread around equally. Those people on both sides don't have the same goals and interests. So even if one side is getting richer on average, it doesn't mean that there will be popular support for continuing that path. For example, the US has gotten richer on average over the years, but that hasn't stopped the backlash against many of the policies that helped that to be in place. Not everyone sees the same money.
Personally, I think that's the right question to ask, and I'm not sure either. Did the Change Through Rapprochement policies help changing the Soviet Union, or would that change and the eventual dissolving have happened anyway?
What's ethical depends on what you value more highly, I guess: principles or outcomes. Start a world war on principle or do shady realpolitik but keep the peace? The same is true here. And sure, money is a factor, but conflict is good for business, too, so I'm not so sure that it's only pulling in one direction.
Well, the US has been dealing directly with drug cartels and it did turn them to have closer ties (e.g. funding them against communists in latin america etc).
And of course drug cartels that get rich enough tend to diversify and branch into legal businesses in a generation or two (they'd rather invest their riches than keep living under constant threat).
Finally, if drugs are made legal, drug cartels are forced to change into mere drug businesses (or branch into other types of much less lucrative and impactful crime, like smuggling).
Dilma Rouseff’s impeachment gave investors more confidence in Brazil for example because they could count on the system actually keeping checks and balances on ambitious individuals. The same can definitely not be said of China.
On the other hand, investing in China could have you get guaranteers by politicians that they'll help with your investment, even bypassing the market rules in your favor, making it much more profitable to invest there.
So you might not get much competition, but you still get highly successful investments.
It's not like western economies don't get too monopolistic and lobby-powered all the time (Amazon, Google, Facebook, and co).
Žižek's critique here is not unique to China (or Asia). The relationship between capitalism and democracy, one that is taught as doctrine in Western economics classes, is being stressed around the world.
How so? It appears to have worked on the Soviet Union, and very few people accurately predicted its fall.
Increased living standards will surely bring change, any likely already have - China is a different place now than it was under Mao, isn't it?
There's also a cultural aspect, of course. "Change" usually implies change to become more like a Western society, but that's not necessarily what the Chinese want.
Correlation != causation. For one, all kinds of Eastern European regimes collapsed before USSR -- which helped a great deal.
Second, it was already not in very good shape from the inside...
Third, China did the same closer capitalist cooperation at the same more or less time as USSR, and is stronger than ever, as opposed to collapsed...
My point was: that may have been (in part) thanks to the Western policy. If you're confrontational, you'll strengthen inner unity, and if you isolate a country, you aren't likely to convince the population that a different system of governance is possible.
The leadership and military of the USSR were no longer willing to violently suppress demonstrations in the 1980s.
This is just wrong. There wasn't anything comparable to Deng's reforms in 1980s USSR - indeed the Brezhnev-era folks and their immediate successors were pushing for more socialism, not less. Even Gorbachev didn't exactly start out as a pro-West social liberal!
The key difference was western companies were happy to (quietly) transfer expertise and technology to the Chinese. In the late 80s the international oil giants were helping the Chinese drill for oil while the Soviets were going (more) broke trying to drill theirs on their own, while Bush claimed “no bailout for Gorbachev”.
The west squandered a chance to implement a “Marshall plan” and make a strong ally out of the Soviets. Instead they chuckled at its collapse and danced on its grave, while rewarding the Chinese for choosing the path of authoritarianism, and here we are.
We definitely made this particular mistake much later on, in the 1990s; I'll give you that. But what you're saying wrt. the Brezhnev era requires some evidence if it is to be plausible. If perestrojka was Brezhnev's idea, it sure seems weird that it would only be implemented with Gorbachev.
So why weren't they?
Besides, after all the decades of drabness nobody really believed in some imminent glorious future as a justification anymore -- like they could still believe in the 20s and 30s...
Well, it depends. If you're well above the typical middle-income country, I think you'd still benefit from more democracy. Democratic countries tend to benefit from increased openness, which is vital to creating wealth and avoiding disruptions of all sorts when you're at the forefront of economic development - and we see this even in historical times where non-democratic polities were far more common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_IX_of_France#Veneration_...