SOURCES OF CRISIS IN WESTERN WORLD: INSTITUTION, STATE CONSTRUCTION AND WORLD SYSTEM

FAN YONGPENG

Vice Director, China Institute, Fudan University

In recent years, the Western-led globalization has been on the horns of dilemma with endemic political crises occurring in the United States and European countries. Within the West, liberalism and pluralist ideology have begun to be criticized and rejected.What is wrong with the West today?Is it periodic oscillation, evolutionary setback or fundamental failure? Is it decadence of political system, failure of state-building or even failure of civilization model? The general judgment of this essay is that the current crisis in the West is primarily registered as fundamental political systemic crisis, which however also reflects the risk of a total failure of the Western model of statebuilding, the Western cultural values and the Western-led world order.

REPATRIMONIALIZATION OF WESTERN POLITICAL SYSTEM

The main function of politics is to solve the problem of power and interest distribution. All political systems hitherto are to turn violent competition into a certain kind of competition where violence is not necessarily involved. In pre-modern society, most of the civilizations relied on patrimonial principles for maintaining distribution of political power. However the greatest problem of aristocratic system was inequality of people by blood lineage and eternal warfare between varying aristocratic lineages. Thus, it became universal pursuit of early human civilizations to move beyond local patrimonial politics.

Relatively speaking, China moved beyond patrimonial politics earlier, with an institutional guarantee by a system of choosing rulers that gradually developed and became mature ranging from recommendation system of Han dynasty to imperial examination after Sui and Tang Dynasties. The imperial examination was an objective method of selecting members of the ruling group,which in essence was to turn power resources that needed to be contested by a bloody struggle into knowledge resources that did not need to be contested by a bloody struggle. No matter how decadent and corrupt the system turned out to be in the later stage, in terms of institutional wisdom, it sat on top of pre-modern political setups of mankind, securing the basic equality of Chinese civilization. It is on the basis of this tradition that the PRC has been established ,which is more equal in essence through the people and their vanguard directly taking political power and by letting the people be educated and command knowledge.

In moving beyond patrimonial politics, other civilization made varying attempts, such as those made by empires of medieval Catholic Church and in the Arab world. But all of them failed to set up a stable institutional model that completely replaced aristocracy based on blood lineage, and Europe in particular finding itself in the quagmires of dynasty and aristocratic wars as late as in the early period of modern history.

It was ultimately relying on capitalism that the Western civilization basically moved beyond patrimonial politics. The core of the capitalist system is to turn power resources that need to be contested by a bloody struggle into wealth resources that do not need to be contested by a bloody struggle. Its concrete forms started with various republics of Medieval Italy, going through development in the Netherland Republic and coming into ideal institutions fitting to the capitalist mode of production in the British “Glorious Revolution”,which was developed further and popularized by the United States, becoming the base-color of today’s Western system.

On December 20, 2017, the U.S.House of Representatives and Senate passed a tax reform bill, the largest in scale in the country since 1986. It will be implemented as of January 2018 after U.S. President Donald Trump signed it. Trump was making a speech on passing the tax re-form bill at the White House in Washington, D.C. in the picture.

Comparing with the ancient China that replaced power resources by knowledge ones, there are both advantages and disadvantages for the modern West to replace power resources by wealth ones. In regard to its advantages, the Western system is propitious to growth,innovation, vitality and development of science and technology. In regard to its disadvantages, first of all, the marginal cost of distribution and dissemination of knowledge is relatively small and, in comparison, distribution of wealth is closer to a kind of zero-sum game, giving rise to a confrontational political culture. As such, knowledge based source of power tends to produce proliferating power and rising equality whereas wealth based source of power tends to produce monopoly. Secondly,knowledge is weak for inheritance whereas wealth tends to be easier to inherit, and more patrimonial. Third, it has basic prerequisites for health, intellectual capacity and personal character to acquire knowledge, more propitious to enabling rulers to have basic capacity for government. In contrast, acquisition of wealth may totally come out of opportunity and pure luck, hardly possible to ensure rulers chosen on the basis of wealth to meet the basic prerequisites above. The advantages and disadvantages aforementioned decide that the Western system necessarily gives rise to a situation where liberty increases rapidly but equality is seriously impaired, that is to say that the modern Western system cannot entirely break patrimonial politics, but only has broken feudalism in a limited way, still bearing the stigma of the middle ages.

The improvement on equality by the Western system determines that it enjoyed a major development moving beyond the middle ages. However, the disadvantages above mentioned mean that it provided only a limited space for progress for equality, whose bearable institutional ceiling was soon overstretched by the development of history.A challenge to such a ceiling was the Socialist Movement of the 19thcentury.However, an unanticipated outcome of both of the World Wars was the destruction of inventory capital and long accumulated economic inequality whereas the high-speed growth of the post-War recovery reduced the speed of growing inequality. All this created an illusion of prosperity, equality and progress lasting for more than half a century.

However, as long as the logic of capitalism is at work, the West system is bound to replicate the above selfdestructive process. Since the disappearance of external competitor with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Western system has returned t0 such a logical process, the capital becoming once more arbitrary, the society polarizing rapidly, the gap between the rich and poor widening and the distribution of power being solidified. In the end,a once vigorous capitalist system has returned a semi-feudal patrimonial system. Hence, the systemic problems of the West are by no means minor and side issues but a historical foreordination.

The Western crisis does not belong to the West only. With the development of market economy and the ascendance of capital power, China may also face the same problems. Without a force like the Communist Party that represents the people and the public, or if such a force failed to live up to its values and ideals,China could fall into the same crisis as the West. It is here that rests the key to decide if the Chinese model can or cannot take a successful road that is different from the West one.

CRISIS IN COMMUNITY-BIULDING AND CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS

As Huntington observed, political systems are but superficial, ephemeral and expedient means of civilizations. The systemic crisis of the West is a relatively superficial phenomenon, the underlying cause of which however is community crisis or state-building crisis and accompanying cultural contradictions.

The aforementioned universal demand of the early human civilization to move beyond local patrimonial politics,to a large extend, drove the direction of development of various political communities of mankind, namely to move from local and small community to unified communities that transcend localities. Not only did unification bring about peace, security and universal political order, it also created conditions for a unified internal marked, largescale division of social labor, infrastructural construction and cultural production on a higher level. In addition,modern capitalism has also through unification displayed scale effects of technological and industrial innovation.Comparing the system of Qin dynasty of China, the American Constitution and the European Treaties for integration, one can find that behind the veiling of argument on “rights” they share many similar objectives. Therefore, it is worth noting that unification is a principal “universal value” of political development of human society.

Most of the ancient civilizations underwent transition from the age of city-states to that of unified empires.However, the unification is different in degree and except China, retrogress has happened to all other civilizations oneway or the other, partially returning to local patrimonial politics. Europe saw the worst retrogress resulting in failure to move beyond the middle ages even after several empires had come into being in the Arab world.

Not until the Enlightenment did Europe recover the slow process of community-biulding, on the basis of learning from the splendid institutional achievements of China and the Arab Empires to some extent, in which the public power that was separated from the society once again grew on the European soil a millennium after the collapse of the Roman Empire. All of the European countries are a product of this process. However, it is both a great fortune and a misfortune that capitalism was born in England before the completion of the state-building process,whereupon capitalism and communitybuilding have become a pair of logics that complement and constrain one another.

According to the logic of communitybuilding, it is necessary for the West to keep pursuing “integration” on a higher level, which is the ideal of political philosophy of European Christianity and that of various theories of eternal peace and of a world empire, or in another word a certain form of unification. But according to the logic of capitalism,capital expansion in its early stage needed to be sustained by the state with a policy of mercantilism so that it sped up the formation of a political community, whereas in its later stage, the contradiction between liquidity of capital and locality of states was underscored.The capital turned out to be a constraining factor for community-building to develop on a higher level.

The clashes of both logics in practice resulted in the spreading of the mode of capitalist production originated in Great Britain to the rest of Europe via competition and warfare between countries, which sped up nation-state building in Europe and at the same time led to premature solidity of the nationstate structure, disabling the replication of the model of community-building on a higher plane. Thereby, Europe entered into a “model of great powers”(the United States being an exception).Since then the capital has jumped out of its host of nation-states and begun its world expansion, the strain between the liquidity of capital and the locality of countries becoming the nightmare of the Western civilization that cannot be driven off.

Both of the World Wars were a total outbreak of these contradictions. It is the existence of the United States as a special force that prevented it from evolving into the collapse of the Western civilization itself. After the Second World War, both the Western Civilization and capitalism gained re-birth and apparently entered a golden age. But in fact, the Western Civilization has never been out of the contradictions between the logic of community-building and that of capitalism, which continue to exist in the form of cultural contradictions, boiling down to three kinds of contradictions as follows.

The first is the contradiction between the group and the individual. The subsistence of any community is based on a certain kind of group awareness whereas it is necessary for capitalism to be based on individualism, the core values of capitalism, liberty, rule of law,rights, contract and procedures all being individual-based.

In face of class struggle from within and competition of Communism from without, the Western countries could not but absorb many socialist elements such as universal suffrages, labor rights,social securities, women’s rights and ethnic minority rights and the list goes on. However, while absorbing such elements, it was necessary for them to take away group-based socialist values and to engraft such rights to individualism.This process has sown the seeds for nonself-reconcilable contradictions, either the Western European welfare-states or the US New Deal liberalism is an entitlement movement based on individualism. Therefore, in spite of the halos on the surface like “progressivism”, “great society” and “welfare society”, the risks of social atomization and disintegration are in the making from within, which intensifies the contradiction between the group and the individual.

The second is the contradiction between centralization and decentralization of power. The logic of communitybuilding requires centralization of power, and without capitalism, statebuilding of Europe could have evolved on the route of centralization. From the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire,from the Roman Empire to the Byzantine Empire, from feudalism to constitutional government, from the Republican system in the middle ages to the centralized modern states, there was a hidden tendency for centralization of power in the whole European political history.

However, capitalism requires a limited being of the state so as to help it capture and control the latter and get rid of it when necessary. Therefore, the logic of capitalism leads to constraint of state power by individual rights and local power, which is the essence of so-called “constitutional government”.

Not only have the conflicts between the two logics led to federalism of the United States and Germany where state(Bundesland)’s power constrains centralized power, they have also resulted in retrogress in European countries that had taken the road to centralization of power. Since the end of the Second World War, most of those European countries have undergone decentralization of power to localities by varying degrees. The recent issue of local independence in Spain is but one of the few of its results coming into the open.More important, it has fundamentally blocked the progress of the European integration process.

The third is the contradiction between exclusion, naturalization and pluralism. According to the logic of community-building, it is necessary for a country to promote homogenization of its population, to whose end there are two possible methods one being exclusion and the other, naturalization.Before the Second World War, Europe used both methods whereas the United States used the latter in the main.

In the post-war years, the United States and the European countries all entered into a progressive period marked by entitlements, in which equal rights are combined with individualism (that is, partial socialist values are combined with core capitalist values)giving rise to “cultural pluralism”. In the 1970s various pluralisms held sway,which was a complicated phenomenon.However, in general they were fitting to the logic of capitalism at the cost of that of community-building. Since the 1980s,pluralism has continued to result in“cultural wars” within the Western societies. To date, it has evolved into a social division that is not easy to close.

The synergy of the three contradictions above results in the risk of community separation prevalent in the Western civilization. Even if the Western civilization could get rid of this crisis rapidly, it would take it a fairly long time to rally energy for unification to drive for a continued development of the logic of community-building. If the West could not free itself from the crisis, it would become less and less consequential on the world politics in the future.

FAILURE OF WEST-LED WORLD SYSTEM

Deciding on stability or instability of various civilizations in human history,an important condition is ability of selfsufficiency, which demands geographic scale, population size, resources, energy and mode of production for a given civilization. However on top of all these conditions, political unification is most indispensable. China has the greatest self-sufficiency ability among human civilizations and hence is also the most stable one. In modern history, China is the only country to date to have achieved industrialization without shifting contradictions and side-effect to the outside world. The Western civilization has never achieved self-sufficiency for long. The rise of capitalism has, on the one hand, made up for the shortfall of the Western civilization in selfsufficiency, enabling it to tap resources on global scale and, on the other, made it more dependent on the outside world on a higher plane and in a larger scope and less able to be self-sufficient. Therefore, the Western civilization, either in a single country or as a whole, depends on the success or failure of the world system under its leadership for its rise or fall.

But now such a system shows signs of disintegration. First of all, a contradiction happens between the world system and national interest of the United States. Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in the 1970s, the United States has maintained hegemony of the US dollar by providing the world with liquidity in dollar terms, but at the same time it has to make up for the long term imbalance by importing inexpensive goods, which serves the shortterm interest of the United States but impairs its industrial capacity and class structure in the long run.

Secondly, the US-led world order is different from the British global empire on an important counting, the latter being a colonial empire exercising direct rule over its colonies which, all be it evil in nature, at least provided basic order and governance structure whereas the US-led world order being a financial empire based on liberal principles and setting less store by governance. The United States promotes on surface democracy, the rule of law and human rights but in essence liberal principles serving the interest of capital in its own country, which results in disasters of liberalism, moldering of the states and disappearance of political order wherever the US capital goes.

Last but most important, all of the world system created by the Western civilization is in essence exploitive and hierarchical and has all along faced as it ought to have resistance from other civilizations and therefore cannot be stable for long.

CONCLUSION

This Essay draws a rough historical picture of the present being of the Western civilization, which is far from being perfect. For instance, it contemplates neither a possible gigantic role of technological innovation nor a possibility for the West to solve its problems by launching a war. However, given the premise of an absence of revolutionary change on all other conditions, it is reasonable to draw the following conclusion. First of all, a fundamental problem has happened to the political system of the West. As the capital gets out of control, inequality is on the increase and social classes are solidified,a regression toward patrimonialization has happened to the whole system. Secondly, the systemic crisis reflects the underlying contradictions such as the Western model of state-building and cultural contradictions, whose origins are the contradiction between the logic of community-building and that of the capital, which brings about a result more dangerous than the systemic crisis, the disintegration of the community.Finally, the Western civilization that cannot be self-sufficient depends on the world system for its subsistence. The failure of the modern world system will deal a fatal blow to the West.