Countries like France and Britain didn't suddenly decide on "parliamentary democracy" as a model out of nowhere; they developed a parliament first, when they were still monarchies, and then the parliament suppressed the monarch. The second estate (nobility) of these countries, which previously favored cooperation with a monarch, changed allegiances once the newly-empowered third estate (borgeoisie) gained enough economic power. Top-down power was effectively strangled by the combination of nobles + business owners collectively bargaining, refusing to e.g. build the monarch's war machine for wars they had no say in.
Western democracies looking at this historical model of democratization, expect that the best thing to do for a country's democratic freedoms is to economically enrich the country's borgeoisie, to the point that the existing dictator-empowered oligarchs see more value in supporting the borgeoisie than they do in supporting the dictator.
These things have long been super typical of growing middle-income countries on their way to First-World country status. It's misleading to evaluate one by the standards of the other. Also, why no mention of comparative success stories like the Czech Republic?
Except these things aren't even true, at least not in Poland. Corruption in the classical sense hasn't been a problem here for decades. Nepotism at the upper level of governance (especially in state-owned companies) – true, it's re-emerged. Mixing it up with supposed wealth-amassing, however, makes even less sense because the most egalitarian shift in Poland's economic policy – with empirical observable effects – has so far, for the last 7 years, precisely coincided with the EU-sceptic right-wing populism.
> wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population
Yeah, right. /s https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=P...
> their political spectrums can be resumed as ‶corrupted right-wing guy sucking on the EU tits″
No, it can't, it's more complicated than that. I think your language alone says a lot about how much thought has gone into your statements.
In short, Poland has seen a shift in its policy towards the EU after around 2015. A lot of it can be attributed to pre-Brexit Conservative Party-style anti-EU populism (and, if that's the case, why make it appear like a post-Soviet phenomenon alone?), but a part of it is genuinely related to the general debate about the future of the EU and its policies. The last words quoted, aside from their vulgarity, are just totally inaccurate. One thing to consider is the cohesion funds (which, by the way, the European Commission has blocked, and rightly so, from Hungary) and the pandemic recovery fund (which it has barred Poland from, also rightly so), but you can't reduce the discussion to those, especially in the recent weeks when Poland has shouldered the lion share of the European cost of welcoming Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.
And, of course, the Polish political parties include a very significant pro-EU liberal opposition stronghold, usually just slightly trailing the populist ruling party in the election polls. So, no, your description of the spectrum is far from the truth.
I mean, even the three countries mentioned are vastly different from one another in where they stand. Today's Hungary, admittedly, has gone the farthest in terms of limiting the freedom of media and dismantling the judicial system. Poland's ruling party has not gone that far, and I would say it's very unlikely it will, for historical reasons – the anarcho-democratic political traditions are just too strong, as is the civil society.
So, in short, I'm all for being alarming when that's warranted, and there are things to be alarmed with, to various extent, when looking at last years' developments in Poland (can't speak for other countries). But one needs to stay truthful at the same time.
"As of late" we're getting democracy-flavoured populism with the governing party restricting free media and repeating divide and conquer campaigns to create a voting bloc that gives them absolute majority.
Hungary and Serbia are probably a lost cause at this point. Poland is slowly getting there.
If that is absent, criticism towards government increases and its legitimacy is questioned if it cannot provide stable growth anymore.
But I fully agree that democracy is still the most successful model and still striving. A mistake western governments often make lately is to be too afraid of it.
Historians didn't have anything to do with all the decisions that were made by politicians making deals with China. It was the financial industry and the politicians they finance who came up with bullshit PR to convince the public opinion that China would magically become a democracy if the west started free trade with China. No historian was ever consulted unless it was to give credit to that PR campaign.
Now did a significant part of the chinese population become wealthier as the result? Yes, it doesn't change the fact that China was, is and will be a bloody dictatorship, for a long time, by western standards.
The west needed to outsource slavery for economic purposes, as always, the west got them slaves.
Note, though, that the means by which overthrow occurs is mostly orthogonal to its consequences; the important thing is instead who's doing the overthrowing. Most coups are done by a small group, who become a new aristocracy after the coup succeeds. Democratization occurs when, instead, 1. the overthrow is populist in nature, but 2. no power vacuum is created for new aristocrats to step into, as the populace (esp. the borgeoisie) have managed to install a new governmental structure that doesn't require dynasty-driven statesmanship and foreign diplomacy policy.
Historians would be making the classic correlation|causation fallacy. Your French example is apt because China has created a bourgeoisie class which is also the effective monarchy. Historians might say that China has learned from history and ensured that their powerful class cannot be usurped.
I think it much more convincing that social values determine the direction in which a country allows government to rule them. Chinese values are miles apart from French values, and their citizens are just much more comfortable with submitting to authoritarian rule. I base this on living in the country, as well as cultural research such as this: https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/china/
There's some truth to this, but you can do event studies to show that economic conditions play a very large causal role too. e.g. the massive quantitative spike in Hitler's popularity 1 year into the depression (this is the main data point I want to bring up, because it's quantifiable by polling numbers), or the 1917 Russian Revolution which only was successful because of the dire conditions brought about due to WW1, or the CCP only getting into power because of Japanese occupation and degradation of the KMT.
I don’t think you understand the functional meanings of these terms.
People like the modern Russian “oligarchs” or their Chinese equivalents are, in function, nobility, whether they are granted any formal titles or not. You’re a noble in function if 1. you helped the current regime gain power; 2. you can use your ongoing necessity to the regime’s hold on power to coerce the current regime into granting you more semi-sovereign autonomous power; 3. this semi-sovereign autonomous power (the classical example being private armies; the modern example being control of state industries) could be used to topple the regime if enough of it were concentrated.
To be in the borgeoisie, on the other hand, is to be a capitalist — even a magnate — but to not have any individual semi-sovereign autonomous power over the state. Rather, the borgeoisie have such power as a block — they could, together, strangle the economy — but they are by definition not monopolists, and so none of them has any chance of starting or winning a coup on their own.
To put it another way: if Facebook was a private company with a single 100% owner, that owner would still be a member of the borgeoisie of America. However, if Boeing was a private company with a single 100% owner, that owner would be a functional noble — an “oligarch” — title or no.
As well, such a hypothetical individual owner of Boeing, together with a few other such individual owners for other military industries, could independently declare a "vote of no confidence" in their country, and "hand over" power to some foreign nation invading them, simply by cutting off war-time logistical supply at just the right time.
These types of power, are exactly the sorts of power that made classical aristocrats, aristocrats, rather than just courtiers.
Just need to become a donor and provide campaign contributions. You get semi-sovereign autonomous power pretty soon.
Like what happened in Nazi Germany? /s
"'Free trade is essential for human rights'. The end of that sentence is, 'we hope... because nothing else has worked.'"
^ http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTransc...
I'd take "Put me under and harvest all my organs" before "firing squad or electrocution" any day, but that's just me. Unfortunately for Richard Bernard Moore he doesn't live in an evil dictatorship.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-carolina-execute-...
> China plans to implement a new national donation system which will allow the government to phase out next year the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners to be used in transplant operations.
China’s health ministry said yesterday that a new national organ donation system is being developed after officials said using organs from death-row prisoners was neither ethical nor sustainable. [0]
[0] - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/11/2/china-to-cut-jail-o...
Perhaps you are ready to give up your car, fruit, coffee, electronics, plastics, your detached suburban home, the ability to heat it in winter... And are ready to go work in a clothing sweatshop.
But you'll have a hell of a time convincing your neighbours of this.
Which of all of these new, unregulated extraction and manufacturing jobs will you be signing up to do? Will you be doing your fifty hours in the unregulated zinc mine, or your sixty-five in the Nike jeans sweatshop?
Productivity isn't like money, you can't just turn on a printing press and make more of it.
Besides, cost of living isn’t that cheap in the west anyways.
Yes, it was just done in shining beacons of freedom like Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, with the resources to fuel it coming in large part from despotic regimes in Africa, or juntas in South America, or petro-sheikdoms.
> Besides, cost of living isn’t that cheap in the west anyways.
It can always go up further.
In the meantime, before we take drastic, widely unpopular measures, perhaps we could take baby steps, like not actively working towards creating more dictatorships..? We can do a lot on this front, by doing very little.
It’s really simple. There’s been decades of opportunity to hold Nike accountable, but people continued to support sweatshop labor. Sweatshop labor is not directly related here, but it supports a system that does not value human lives.
Offshoring labor, out of sight out of mind, to countries like China is a negative externality. Suddenly now China is the only one to blame when the externality is no longer external ( microplastics ).
It would not be hypocritical if countries “internalized their negative externalities”, or maybe just not create negative externalities or internalities in the first place. e.g. demote consumption, but that would not be very American. Just look at the public / self storage industry. Americans have two door garages and that’s still not enough. That part is really not China’s fault, even though they are the enabler.
There should not be ongoing supply chain issues then.
> they would still have rotted
This sounds sinophobic. Your profile mentions you’re from London. Yes, China was doing fine for a millennia, too, then the British colonizers brought opium and drugged their people.
> have been forced to reform through economic failure.
Yes, they did that. It’s cause embracing capitalism and free trade.
May I introduce you to... colonialism? See also: how the battle of Plassey and subsequently income from India helped fund the industrial revolution. I can't speak much about Chinese colonial history (I expect it to be roughly about as brutal and violent as Indian colonial history) but boy does your comment ignore several centuries of history.
In so far that there would not be supply chain issues causing massive inflation?
How would Amazon, Apple, the world’s richest companies be so without China?
This embeds a colonialist / Western bias presuming that Americans companies are leading the charge and orchestrating everything, and the natives are incapable of self organizing. This is opposed to American companies being customers, and Chinese companies offering them a cheap all inclusive solution with implementation details ( factories / labor ) already sorted out. Since you pointed out Shen Zhen specifically.
Obviously we share theirs since we’ve shown were interested in cutting costs at the expense of quality.
Apple would be more like a Cartier or Tiffany...A few small exclusive shops around Monaco and the Cote de Azur.
But yeah, Apple would have automated things. Except the part where they pass the savings on to end customers.
Furthermore in Apple’s case, they want China to be rich, too, because that’s a big market.
We would, on average, be richer and more democratic if we had retained our wealth-generating jobs. Instead, we gave the wealth-generating part of our corporations to Chinese labourers.
As a result, China now has a rapidly-expanding middle-class and America has a rapidly-diminishing middle class.
The only Americans who truly benefited from this move are the billionaires whose corporations profited by exploiting third world slave labour.
The rust belt is struggling and the rise of Trump was direct consequence of that.
Respectfully, I suggest before telling others to re-read, some basic understanding of civics, electoral college, constituency and how elections are held would be helpful for yourself.
I don't think it's wrong, but it's worth noting that their dates to when China openly admitted to sourcing organ donations from execution victims. I wouldn't be surprised if China were continuing this practice, but I doubt that America genuinely cares about these execution victims any more than they suddenly started caring that Saddam's genocide in the 1980s before they invaded Iraq, or that Russia genuinely cares about Nazis in Ukraine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
The goal of "promotion of democracy" is a simple propaganda lie that doesn't stand up to even the most cursory examination.
Even benevolent dictatorships?
> sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity
The future is unwritten. Actors behave reflexively. Imagine how bad the future looked in July of 1940 after Germany conquered France. It must have appeared as though they'd soon conquer all of Europe, with the rest of the world to follow. And yet, a few short years later, Nazi Germy was annihilated.