The Western model is broken (long read).....he went in :wow:

[Trajan]

Some excerpts

“Why should a nation that has developed in its own way, under completely different conditions from those of the west European states, with different elements in its life, live through the European past, and that, too, when it knows perfectly well what that past leads to?”

an obsolete assumption even in 1989: that the 20th century was defined by the battles between liberal democracy and totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism and communism. Their obsession with a largely intra-western dispute obscured the fact that the most significant event of the 20th century was decolonisation, and the emergence of new nation-states across Asia and Africa. They barely registered the fact that liberal democracies were experienced as ruthlessly imperialist by their colonial subjects.

In the 21st century that old spell of universal progress through western ideologies – socialism and capitalism – has been decisively broken. If we are appalled and dumbfounded by a world in flames it is because we have been living – in the east and south as well as west and north – with vanities and illusions: that Asian and African societies would become, like Europe, more secular and instrumentally rational as economic growth accelerated; that with socialism dead and buried, free markets would guarantee rapid economic growth and worldwide prosperity. What these fantasies of inverted Hegelianism always disguised was a sobering fact: that the dynamics and specific features of western “progress” were not and could not be replicated or correctly sequenced in the non-west.

Furthermore, imperialism had deprived them, as Basil Davidson argued in The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, of the resources to pursue western-style economic development; it had also imposed ruinous ideologies and institutions upon societies that had developed, over centuries, their own viable political units and social structures.

What may have been the right fit for 19th-century colonialists in countries with endless resources cannot secure a stable future for India, China, and other late arrivals to the modern world, which can only colonise their own territories and uproot their own indigenous peoples in the search for valuable commodities and resources.

But then western ideologues during the cold war absurdly prettified the rise of the “democratic” west. The long struggle against communism, which claimed superior moral virtue, required many expedient feints. And so the centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, brutal exploitation, and genocide were suppressed in accounts that showed how westerners made the modern world, and became with their liberal democracies the superior people everyone else ought to catch up with. “All of the western nations,” James Baldwin warned during the cold war in 1963, are “caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and the west has no moral authority.”

The most successful European states had also accomplished a measure of economic growth before gradually extending democratic rights to a majority of the population. “No European country,” Aron pointed out, “ever went through the phase of economic development which India and China are now experiencing, under a regime that was representative and democratic.”

the blood-splattered French revolutionary tradition, which requires “people to submit to the strictest discipline in the name of the ultimate freedom” – whose latest incarnation is Isis and its attempt to construct an utopian “Islamic State” through a reign of terror.

No less than the World Bank admitted last month that emerging economies – or the “large part of humanity” that Bayly called the “long-term losers” of history – might have to wait for three centuries in order to catch up with the west. In the Economist’s assessment, which pitilessly annuls the upbeat projections beloved of consultants and investors, the last decade of rapid growth was an “aberration” and “billions of people will be poorer for a lot longer than they might have expected just a few years ago”.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/14/-sp-western-model-broken-pankaj-mishra

 

[I.AM.PIFF]

 

[babylon1]

tadow

 

[KOohbt]

Western civilization never worked.

 

[Shogun]

What's preferable to democracy?

Honest question...

 

[The_King_of_Everything]

 

[OsO]

What's preferable to democracy?

Honest question...

the system is of secondary importance.

the people running the system are of primary importance.

 

[JahFocus CS]

the system is of secondary importance.

the people running the system are of primary importance.

I think this is fundamentally mistaken, considering that people are shaped by institutions from birth. Institutions shape incentives and constraints.

What's preferable to democracy?

Honest question...

Democracy is great. It is a nice idea and one that we need to have implemented. 99.999999999999% of the world doesn't have it.

 

[Berniewood Hogan]

What's preferable to democracy?

Honest question...

 

[Gallo]

"The west has lost the power to shape the world in its own image – as recent events, from Ukraine to Iraq, make all too clear."

I recall a short time ago Ukraine being a Russian satellite and Iraq being controlled by Saddam. Neither is true today. I say the west is doing fine thanks.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

"The west has lost the power to shape the world in its own image – as recent events, from Ukraine to Iraq, make all too clear."

I recall a short time ago Ukraine being a Russian satellite and Iraq being controlled by Saddam. Neither is true today. I say the west is doing fine thanks.

precisely.

iraq was doomed from the first gulf war and you can't expect russia to just stay dormant following the collapse.

 

[OsO]

I think this is fundamentally mistaken, considering that people are shaped by institutions from birth. Institutions shape incentives and constraints.

but who shaped the institutions?

the people.

 

[Trajan]

"The west has lost the power to shape the world in its own image – as recent events, from Ukraine to Iraq, make all too clear."

I recall a short time ago Ukraine being a Russian satellite and Iraq being controlled by Saddam. Neither is true today. I say the west is doing fine thanks.

Iraq: The West (America) thought you can remove Saddam and impose democracy there. What's Iraq like today?

Russia: After the fall of Communism, the assumption was that the Russians would be more in line with the West by being more democratic and having a free market. Where are we today with Putin acting like a 21st century Tsar and vast chunks of the economy in the hands of Oligarchs.

On both accounts the assumption that liberal democracy is the ''natural'' way of running things has been proven to be false.

 

[Ghost_In_A_Shell]

 

[Trajan]

What's preferable to democracy?

Honest question...

Whatever works for local people.

Democracy works in Western Europe and it's offspring (US, Canada, Australia etc) because they arrived at that system via hundreds of years worth of religious, political, ideological and economic wars. They formed at the state level..... consolidated then disintegrated empires...now back to closely cooperating states. They basically arrived at a consensus.

The same cannot be said for people all over the world.

E.g Dictatorship seems to work for Singaporeans. The Chinese are doing well with their model. Most Saudis are against democracy because of the inevitable instability of tribal and sectarian rivalry for power. They have arrived at their own consensus...they might tinker aound with it in the future..who knows?..but liberal democracy is not the panacea to everyone's problems.