It's a Cold, Cold, Cold War

Great Powers and Regime (Non)Promotion in Asia

Yesterday I was on a panel at Berkeley titled “Democracy, Authoritarianism, and Geopolitics in Asia”. It was moderated by Susan Hyde, with Sheena Chestnut Greitens and Dan Slater as the other panelists.

Dan and Sheena are two people whose work I’ve admired and who, as you can see from their bios, are far more qualified to speak about Asian politics. I was there mainly due to Susan’s generosity and secondarily due to the subject of my book, which looked at how great power competition has shaped the evolution of democracy. My comments are below:

Since I’m here to talk great powers, let me begin by saying a little about the key geopolitical rivalry in the region, the US-China relationship. There is an ongoing debate about how to label this and whether we should call it a Cold War. The label is indeed fraught with all sorts of ideological problems, and this is made worse by the fact that people use the term in different ways. So let’s unpack a bit what we mean by a “Cold War”.

I’ve seen people embracing the Cold War as an analogy, and others rejecting the comparison outright. Neither position is helpful by itself, because it hides a duality at the heart of the analogy. And that is that there are two ways of thinking about the Cold War — as an international system, and as a geopolitical rivalry.

If we’re talking about the Cold War as an international system, there's no comparison to the present day. Relatively rigid global bipolarity was a strange and historically unique condition, and unlikely to come back.

But in the second sense, as a world-endangering geopolitical rivalry, the situation is similar in some respects but different in others. Probably most worrying is that we have lots of arms proliferation but very little arms control. This is where comparing today to the Cold War is actually helpful in reminding us of the possible dangers.

But there are lots of big geopolitical rivalries. Should we call all of them Cold Wars? Of course not. Still, the metaphor remains important because policy-makers are increasingly thinking about China in those terms. This is bad if it exacerbates the ideological confrontation; good if it encourages them to be cautious about escalation. I’m still agnostic on this point. 

And just to be provocative for a second, it’s possible that a Cold War with China might be good for domestic US politics, by returning US politics to a measure of foreign policy bipartisan consensus that was present during the Cold War and lacking in the post-Cold War era. One plausible reason for extreme elite polarization is the lack of an external enemy, so it is ironic and sort of morally troubling to consider that a Cold War with China may help preserve American democracy. Again, I raise this as a provocation not an opinion. [As it turns out, this was not so provocative as my co-panelist Dan Slater recently wrote a piece making the same point.]

Setting aside the issues of rhetorical framing, there are a number of substantive critiques of the analogy. Generally, we can break them up into three arguments for why we will not have a cold war with China: ideological, economic, and geopolitical.

The first argument is there is no ideological struggle as with the USSR. China is not insistent on its version of democracy promotion, it’s not seeking to convert fellow travelers, not is it offering a universalizing ideology. 

The ideology argument seems to me the weakest. The conflict is already ideological in the sense of US and China offering two competing visions of modernity, and in the sense that policy-makers on both sides are convinced of the superiority of their system. It will get more ideological as the conflict sharpens up, and I expect Chinese reticence at regime promotion will fade away. I’ll come back to this point in a moment.

A second argument is that globalization and extensive economic ties will moderate conflict. Again, this is very different than in the Cold War, where the two superpowers had their economic blocks that didn’t interact with each other very much. Unlike in the Cold War, the two great powers are deeply connected.

With economics, the argument is more compelling, but we know economic ties are not irreversible. The specter of Norman Angell hangs over these economic explanations, even accepting the fact that the modern economy with its complex supply chains etc, is very different than in 1914. Nevertheless, I think it will be a moderating force. Decoupling is hard. 

Third, we no longer have a fairly rigid bipolar system with two opposing alliances. Geopolitically, the world lacks the setup for the kind of stark competition we saw in the cold war. This is what I meant earlier when I was talking about the Cold War as a system. 

The third argument is to me the strongest. As I said, rigid bipolarity was unusual and we are not going back to it. When people say they reject the Cold War analogy, this is usually what they mean - a bipolar system is too unique to be repeated.

So globalization and multipolarity both act as moderating factors, and both of those make the historical comparison to the Cold War problematic. But in the end, the question is whether ideological differences and domestic incentives pushing for a Cold War (in both countries) will be strong enough to overcome the moderating effects of globalization and multipolarity. I, like many others, suspect they will, and we will see increased great power competition between China and the US.

So let’s accept that we will have some version of great power competition, without necessarily committing to a loaded term like Cold War. What does this tension mean for democracy, and domestic regimes more generally?

During the Cold War, both superpowers were utopian in their aspirations and universalist in their goals, and both offered a vision for political and social development that explicitly transcended national boundaries.  

Will we see something similar today?

One critique of the Cold War analogy is that China is simply not engaging in that sort of regime promotion. That it lacks the desire to do so, that it’s focused on technocratic assistance, not ideological crusades. I wrote in my book that “China might be the first non-proselytizing great power since the Dutch Golden Age.” 

That was a few years ago. Now I’m not so sure. It’s fairly clear that Chinese officials are not just a bunch of technocrats; they are guided by ideology. And even if they are guided by ideology instrumentally — that is, they don’t really believe it, they’re doing it to please the leader or to conform — the effects are the same. A country that’s growing more materially powerful while also becoming more ideological will soon find reasons to wage crusades abroad. It happened to the US, it happened to the USSR, it even happened to fascist states Germany. Even the Nazis, not natural candidates for regime promotion, cultivated philofascist organizations and supported fellow travelers in South America, the Middle East, and south-central Europe. Any regime can be for export if it offers an appealing mixture of power and ideas.

I think it’s true that in the short run the CCP is interested in stability and survival, not regime promotion. Prestige, image protection maybe. But rising powers, especially if they feel sufficiently stable at home, tend to discover external interests they didn’t know they had.

Autocratic Waves and Diffusion

Worries about increasing Chinese influence are happening in a context of global worries about democracy. And we hear a lot of talk about an autocratic cascade or an autocratic wave, of which Asia is a part. If we are in fact experiencing an autocratic wave globally, will this affect Asia? 

Well, when we look at the history of regime change in a global perspective over the twentieth century, we see autocratic cascades unfolding in two distinct ways. 

One path is the sudden rise of non-democratic great powers. And by sudden rise I mean a hegemonic shift in which a non-democratic great power rapidly increases its share of relative power. And we see this twice, with Germany’s resurgence after 1933, and Russia’s emergence as a superpower after 1945. This is what I would call the autocratic ascent path.

The second path is what I call democratic overstretch, or rollback from past democratic waves. These waves produce a kind of democratic equivalent of a stock market bubble, in which there are all sorts of powerful but ephemeral pressures for democratic reforms. And all these countries adopt democratic reforms that have little chance of sustaining them, because there are powerful international pressures for doing so, but those pressures don’t last, or they shift from democracy promotion to geopolitical rivalry. Even when the democratic transition succeeds, then you have to actually govern, and those domestic conditions required for democratic consolidation are simply not there. 

We see this in Europe in the 1920s, we see this in Latin America in the late 1940s, we see it Africa and elsewhere in the mid-1990s. And these are autocratic cascades created by democratic overreach and rollback.

So what are we seeing today? I think both pathways of autocratic diffusion can be glimpsed in the international system since 1991. Some states saw a flowering of democracy following the Soviet collapse, only to roll back to autocracy when the pressures of governance proved too destabilizing. Belarus can be taken as an archetypal case here (quality of democracy on the y-axis):

Looking at V-Dem data, we see 27 such trajectories (and another 9 borderline cases) since 1991. Clearly, there is some rollback happening. But we also find 16 cases of relatively democratic states that simply slide into autocracy, like Venezuela:

Yet it’s hard to see many ideological commonalities to these declines other than a rejection of democratic rule. There is some sense of the autocratic ascent story — the decline of American unipolarity and the rise of a new great power challenger embodying a different (and in some places, increasingly attractive) regime model of state capitalism. 

Does China’s regime, however we call it, now represent the newest credible rival to the liberal democratic model—as monarchy, fascism, and communism all did in the past?

The twentieth century suggests that the reality of this prediction depends to a large extent on the changing structure of hegemonic power — namely, the rise and decline of great powers who embody competing regime types. And a clear lesson of past hegemonic shocks is that a sudden decline in American power would pose a much bigger threat to global democracy than a gradual Chinese ascent.  For that reason and others already mentioned by Dan and Sheena, I don’t see the rise of China as inaugurating an autocratic wave in the region any time soon. [At the end of the Q&A we speculated on the future of Asian democracy, and while I equivocated with a non-answer Dan and Sheena both seemed optimistic. I hope they are right.]

Russia

Finally, a word on Russia. And it will be a quick word because Russia is not doing much in the region. Russian politics is entering its late Brezhnev stage, but without the stabilizing social torpor that characterized Brezhnev-era Soviet society. That’s a dangerous combination for the regime. Stability, stability, stability is the overriding priority. And I would add, stability in the face of what it sees as continuing pressure from the West.

The result is Russia turning inward. While Russia doesn’t do regime change, it is obsessed with regime change. That’s a strong word, but I do think it’s very much on the minds of Russian policymakers and especially foreign policy officials. And here I mean regime change by the West. By the US, and Europe, and by NGOs — all with the purpose of undermining and destroying Russia. I believe this was a primary motivation for Russian involvement in the 2016 election. They saw Hillary Clinton as someone who would aggressively pursue regime change through sponsoring Maidan-like revolts and revolutions. 

Russian mentality on regime promotion has been largely defensive, and I think this extends to Asia as well, where it’s trying to navigate a relationship with China as it becomes increasingly unmoored from the West. In this region, Moscow’s interests are subordinated to strengthening that relationship.

I’ll stop there, thanks very much.