A few weeks ago I was privileged to go to the Asia Foundation’s event “The Future of Democracy in Southeast Asia.” I was mainly there to meet up with other IR/PS alumni as I’m more interested in East Asia and China in particular, but surprisingly the event turned more towards the relationship between economics and democracy which was quite fascinating.

The overall subject was how democracy was faring in the region and how that related (or not) to the lack of democracy. Larry Diamond from the Hoover Institution favored the more Modernization Theory approach and Big Bang aspect of turning around a country’s economy by quickly embracing democracy whereas Kishore Mahbubani noted that in fact what matters more is the role of good governance.

Listening intently to the arguments laid out by both sides, I actually could not help but envision the two of them as two differing viewpoints of mine where I truly believe that on the one hand democracy is the best form of government possible for economics in the long-term and for the well-being of the countries’ citizens. Yet, at the same time, democracy and elections are not everything if the democracy is so corrupt and governance so poor that the people begin to clamor for an autocracy that could benefit them instead.

In the same way, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea all developed economically with a system of government that was either not democratic, or at best a minor democracy. China even sees Singapore’s style of government as the best outcome for development rather than a quick change that Russia went through.

Nonetheless, I am an eternal optimist that all countries that want to develop into a first world (aka developed) nation status will have to develop a style of democracy suiting to the country’s citizens in order to consistently root out endemic corruption that grows over time under one system of rule (endemic in this case being longer than eight years). Interestingly, the development of democracy has occured when the average citizen earns around $5000 a year or can afford a car.

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I ran across a blog called “Journalism by Other Means” talking about The New Hegemony, a response via the New York Times article. I strongly suggest reading the full 8-page article (I know, that’s a lot of clicks and time) called Waving Good-bye to Hegemony. Part of the article definitely goes into my previous post on the Rise of Chinese Style Democracy, but I wanted to note some areas of disagreement on a wonderful article that makes me happy to see some journalists really caring about the US/international affairs contrary to this past 8 years (all after the jump…) (more…)

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It’s been interesting to watch China’s rise onto the world stage for the past ten years for me, though nearly twenty years for all kinds of international politics. I can still recall watching on TV the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union with tanks heading towards the Red Square and the ending of the Cold War. Essentially, I am a product of the post-Cold War generation not fully having the maturity to understand the fear of the Soviet Union until after it was gone. I recall a brief time under the first President Bush, but my true development of international politics developed under President Clinton’s two terms.

It was under these terms that the world got to finally see the triumph of democracy over Soviet-style Communism with a whole-hearted shift of the former Soviet Union breaking up and embracing essentially laissez-faire capitalism (Big Bang capitalism). America did the minimal it could to promote democracy within the former Soviet Union (the new Russian Federation), but not including the welfare of the people. Of course we should not have been subsidizing everything that would create a reliance on American money (or potentially insulting the Russians by creating an aura of inferiority to which they are not), but rather a middle ground to help stabilize the reformed country, similar to the bailout and NAFTA agreement with Mexico.

Our sole interest for democracy within Russia without concern for the well-being of the Russian people inadvertently led to the rise of corrupt capitalism, a yearning for a strong leader to deal with the harsh realities on the ground within Russia, and a secure way of doing so. It is my belief that at that point Russia began to look towards the rise of China.

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