Today, two spectres hang over the world
Ultimately, we are presented with two contradictions.
Today, the alternating episodes of depression and mania that describe Western democracies’ new disorder is evident across voter choices and the intensification of their domestic culture wars. Yet, Comrade Xi Jinping is wrong to think of the first of Comrade Deng’s maxims as the more useful. The U.S. may be wracked by pangs and spasms. But these pose far more questions than they currently answer. Ultimately, we are presented with two contradictions.
A bipolar world was one of the more dominant motifs of my teenage years. And it wasn’t just the economics of it. Although the tension between capitalism and the bourgeois democracy that underpinned it on one hand, and socialism (communism in the case of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and the people’s democracy on the back of which it rode was real enough. It was bad that there were no demilitarised zones in the battles that ensued. Far more dire was the goal over which both sides were engaged in mortal struggle: the very soul of man.
Over which, in result, two spectres hung. The first wraith was of a West that promised affluence to all, and a say for each in the affairs of the state. But which, in reality (if its detractors were to be believed), kept the larger number of persons subservient through a proliferation of hierarchies and classes. A doddering infrastructure held up as it were by the myth of meritocracy. Opposed to it was the sprite which promised to each Stakhanovite citizen according to their need from work done according to their ability. Struggle as this might to evoke a prelapsarian Eden, in reality (or so the copious output from Western think tanks argued) it was a burlesque that masked inequalities far worse than Western democracies had managed to produce, precisely because it denied to the people avenues and means of complaining.
Despite the assurances of amity evoked by the idea of political spheres of influence, the alternating episodes of depression and mania characterised by this disorder showed up largely at the margins. The Cold War was prosecuted largely in the Third World. CIA- and KGB-sponsored “wet jobs” to alter the temper of regimes that were considered out of order. The sponsoring of insurrections to overthrow non-compliant regimes. And both sides backing different governments in wars that made sense only within the context of the psychological disorder that the period spoke to.
Did history end in the early 1990s because America no longer had a counterpoint? And was it now free to remake the world in its own image? The United States of America may not have called a halt on the passage of time. But remake the world in its own image, it tried. China’s reward for becoming more liberal and more open was its fudged accession to the World Trade Organisation in December 2001.
In the end, it was the doddering of the Soviet Union that was more enfeebling. It seemed to matter more to the people that they had the opportunity every now and then to choose their leaders and to complain freely than that they might make it to a secular heaven by abjuring bourgeois vices.
So momentous was the unipolar world that succeeded this breakdown that it was scant surprise that a race began to make sense of it. Did history end in the early 1990s because America no longer had a counterpoint? And was it now free to remake the world in its own image? The United States of America may not have called a halt on the passage of time. But remake the world in its own image, it tried. China’s reward for becoming more liberal and more open was its fudged accession to the World Trade Organisation in December 2001.
Yet, in a broader sense, the new China was but one consequence of the bipolar disorder that had ailed the world until 1989. You could describe this ghost as rising from the fact that Deng Xiaoping, twice dismissed as a “capitalist roader” during China’s Cultural Revolution, had since December 1978 become China’s paramount leader. Far more descriptive, however, was the tension between two of Comrade Deng’s maxims. The first to the effect that China should “Hide our strength, bide our time”, and the second an invitation to note that “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”.
A richer China was going to grow a large middle class. And large middle classes are all about political representation. Except that in a democracy, the middle class is but one category in need of a voice. The workforce resizing, offshoring, and automation that were critical to the globalisation process, was creating in affluent societies an increasingly vocal and aggrieved class ― those left behind by a rapidly changing world.
Intoxicated by the failure of Soviet Communism and borne on the wings of the new wave of globalisation, the political establishment in the U.S. chose to decrypt China with the help of Comrade Deng’s second maxim. A more efficient China was going to be richer. A richer China was going to grow a large middle class. And large middle classes are all about political representation. Except that in a democracy, the middle class is but one category in need of a voice. The workforce resizing, offshoring, and automation that were critical to the globalisation process, was creating in affluent societies an increasingly vocal and aggrieved class ― those left behind by a rapidly changing world.
Today, the alternating episodes of depression and mania that describe Western democracies’ new disorder is evident across voter choices and the intensification of their domestic culture wars. Yet, Comrade Xi Jinping is wrong to think of the first of Comrade Deng’s maxims as the more useful. The U.S. may be wracked by pangs and spasms. But these pose far more questions than they currently answer. Ultimately, we are presented with two contradictions. Is the throes that Western democracies are presently passing through, of death or of childbirth? In our rapidly-changing world, the ability of a society to question itself and change in line with the answers this often traumatic process throws up is priceless. There is little doubt that no society will successfully go through this process under big brother’s watchful gaze.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
